Xiaomi’s 12S Ultra rocked the mobile world this year bringing the biggest sensor ever put into a smartphone to the table. And so a lot of people may have heard the phrase “1-inch sensor” for the first time, and naturally assumed that means what you’d think it means.
Unfortunately, the camera space is a weird one, and so it turns out one inch doesn’t always mean one inch in a literal fashion. We’ve explained this at length in our comprehensive review of the Xiaomi 12S Ultra, but that doesn’t mean everyone now knows – or that everyone will be able to refrain from making a certain type of joke about an inch not being an inch.
Cue JerryRigEverything, the YouTube channel that usually brings us smartphone teardowns. We get that too this time around, but also a sensor measuring contest. Armed with a couple of one inch pieces of paper, Zack made it his mission to boldly go inside the 12S Ultra, tearing it down in order to find out something that we already told you a couple of weeks ago in our review, which counts as general knowledge in the camera world: “1 inch” can be a shorthand way of saying “1 inch type” which does not mean it measures precisely one inch on any side or diagonally.
Every camera maker and every smartphone maker is thus “deceiving” if your expectation is for things to measure, in inches, precisely the numbers advertised. This has been a long standing issue, and unfortunately one that no company involved in the production of cameras, camera sensors, or smartphones, has any incentive to fix. So we’ll just have to get used to the fact that sometimes, one inch doesn’t mean one inch.
Anyway, if you want to learn all there is to know about the Xiaomi 12S Ultra, check out our first ever live streamed video Q&A session in which Will answered all of your questions, and of course, our full in-depth written review.