World first: This Ultra phone will raise the bar with 200MP continuous optical zoom

Xiaomi confirmed earlier this week that the Xiaomi 17 Ultra will launch on Christmas Day in China, while also revealing a few tantalizing camera specs. Now, the manufacturer has announced that the device has a cutting-edge periscope camera.

Xiaomi announced on Weibo that the Xiaomi 17 Ultra offers a 200MP continuous optical zoom camera. This means that the lenses and other components inside the camera module shift to achieve optical zoom, and therefore consistent image quality, across a range of zoom levels. This is in line with many conventional standalone cameras.

This approach differs from the vast majority of telephoto cameras seen on smartphones. Conventional telephoto cameras only offer native zoom at one fixed zoom level (e.g., 2x, 3x, 4x, or 5x), but phone makers utilize software processing techniques (e.g., cropping, super-resolution) when you pinch in to zoom further. This software-driven approach generally results in degraded image quality.

Don’t hold your breath for the Xiaomi 17 Ultra to offer a wide zoom range with this camera, though. The 200MP periscope camera offers continuous zoom from 75mm to 100mm (~3.1x to ~4.1x). So Xiaomi will still lean on software processing techniques to zoom beyond 100mm. By contrast, the Sony Xperia 1 VII has a continuous zoom camera that covers 3.5x to 7.1x, albeit with a 12MP camera sensor.

Nevertheless, this is a great addition to the Xiaomi 17 Ultra, and it should give users far more flexibility when it comes to portrait photos and framing in general. The 200MP sensor also means you can likely expect 8.2x zoom at a lossless resolution.

Xiaomi notes that it’s using a 1/1.4-inch 200MP sensor for its continuous zoom camera. This sensor is broadly in line with the Xiaomi 15 Ultra‘s periscope camera. That’s good news, as we’ve seen a couple of brands using Samsung’s smaller 200MP Isocell HP5 camera sensor. A smaller sensor usually means lower light intake and therefore inferior image quality.

The Xiaomi 17 Ultra also has the new Light Hunter 1050L one-inch main camera sensor, which packs LOFIC tech for improved dynamic range. Taken together with the radical zoom camera, it certainly seems like this could be one of the best camera phones on the market.