Chinese smartphone maker Realme’s newest smartphone gets its name from its camera, which the company says supports up to 60x hybrid zoom (or 5x zoom when using optical zoom only).
In fact, the 64MP telephoto camera on the Realme X3 SuperZoom is the phone’s primary camera, although there are also 8MP ultrawide and 2MP macro cameras.
The smartphone also features 32MP primary + 8MP ultrawide selfie cameras packed into a hole in the 6.6 inch, 1080 x 2400 pixel LCD display… which has a 120 Hz refresh rate.
Other features include a Qualcomm Snapdragon 855+ processor, 12GB of RAM, 256GB of UFS 3.0 storage, and a fingerprint sensor on the side of the phone. The Realme X3 SuperZoom has a 4,200 mAh battery and supports 30 watt fast charging.
But it’s the “superzoom” camera that’s the phone’s most distinctive feature — particularly in a phone with a mid-range price tag. The Realme X3 SuperZoom goes on sale in select markets on June 2nd for 499 Euros (about $550, although the phone’s unlikely to be available in the US anytime soon).
According to Android Police, you’re probably not going to get stellar shots if you shoot at the full 60x zoom level, since you’ll end up with digital artifacts. But “everything up to 10x seems perfectly acceptable.” You can find some sample photos and other hands-on impressions in their article.
Another phone with more blue light than others then
I hate the way digital zoom is marketed as equivalent to optical zoom. It can’t do anything more than crop the image, although phones then add in AI generated detail to pretend that isn’t what happened.
They’ve been doing that since the early days of digital cameras, twenty five years ago, so there’s no chance it’s changing now.