Admit it. We still desire to own an iPhone; we won’t want to be seen carrying a cheap phone while having drink session with friends. However, running the risk of losing their over-priced iPhone during vacation is like “Ouch”. It is no secret that most of us carry more than 1 device– one for “work” and a second one for practical use.
Here, we got our hands on the new realme XT. One of the key highlights of the phone is its quad-camera. Yes you heard it right. This phone is packed with not 2, not 3 but 4 rear camera and that is against the triple camera of the iPhone 11. The 64 MP image sensor by Samsung, which realme claimed that it is the highest resolution image sensor in the smartphone market, could shoot ultra-high-resolution photo that is equivalent to the size of a 3.2m X 2.4m poster print-out.
Supreme Camera Specs
Wow… The technical specs do look good on paper. But more camera does not mean anything? How about the overall image quality? We challenged the phone to take night scene of our beautiful Singapore city. The 64MP camera sensor produces reasonable clear, crisp landscape photo even under low light condition. Below is the sample photo of the night scene shot with the 64 MP sensor.
Night shot has always a challenge for camera phone. If we zoomed into the night scene photo, we observe some “noise” on the background. However, the building names are captured reasonably well by 64MP sensor under challenging city lightning.
We have also tested the night mode. The sensor manages to snap the photo within 3 seconds. The image is quite impressive, and its algorithm manages to brighten the dark parts of the photo. For instance, we captured the red hook of the crane in the photo with the night mode turned on.
Limited Internal Storage
As a relatively new brand, realme XT’s camera performance has surprised us. The 64MP image sensor is very appealing to smartphone users. However, The image size shot at 64MP could be as high as 12MB and that is significantly larger than normal (one 64MP image is about 5 times more than the usual image size).
The 128GB internal storage may not be enough for users who love to take pictures with their smartphones. Fortunately, the realme XT has included external microSD slot that could allow user to store additional 256GB.
Camera is good but what else?
I know this may not be relevant as the customer moves towards wireless earpiece. Who still expect to get complimentary earphone when unboxing a new phone? But still, we may want to bring along our favourite headset when we are out for vacation. The option to connect via the legacy 3.5mm audio jack is still more favourable. Well, you can argue that we could bring an additional 3.5mm-to-Type C adaptor. I am on vacation. I just want to bring the minimal.
It has in-display fingerprint sensor which works reasonably fast and the ColorOS by OPPO gives a very clean Android interface which makes the navigation within the OS very pleasing.
Verdict
This OPPO’s spinoff brand has surprised me. In terms of performance, the phone does deliver what most consumers want but at the fraction of the price of high-end models in the market. Camera performance is very decent for the price point.
I do carry a handful of phones out for work purposes, but I always have the tendency to use the realme XT for street and food photography. The attractive price tag on realme XT is appealing to frequent travellers who might afraid of losing their “work” phone (yes I am refering to your iPhone) while traveling. The realme XT could save your travel photo in the old school micro-SD card and you don’t need to rely on internet access to backup your photo and this is especially useful when you visit countries where internet accessibility is poor.