Hey there my Hive friends and followers!
I know my blog has been pretty much dead lately but if you were following it back in the days when I was still active here and posted regularly, you might remember that even though my content has always been greatly visual, I actually never owned a real camera. I have been always shooting just with my phones and they were not even good ones :) My last phone served me well for some six years but it was time to get a new one. My last phone was Xiaomi and I was really happy with it so I wanted to stay loyal to this brand. Looking at what the current models offer, my priority was obvious: get the best deal on the camera. After some quick research, I decided to go for this beauty.
It´s Xiaomi Redmi Note 13 Pro (I took the photo above with my old phone, naturally :D) and while it´s still one of the most affordable models out there (the price was just some 6,000 CZK which is like 260 USD), the camera looks really good and the reviews were mostly excellent. If you are interested in all the specs of the camera or the phone itself, feel free to check them out on the internet. In this post, I´m only going to brief you on my own experience (so far) and share some pictures here.
This phone supports many functions and cool features that none of my previous phones had and I´m yet to try most of them, including the night mode, the long exposure, the AI feature etc. but I don´t know if I ever get to write a proper review so let me show you what I have tried so far. The quality of landscape shots (in good light conditions) seems very similar to what I usually ended up with before with my old Xiaomi.
However, the zoom function on the new one is really cool. The following two pictures were taken from the very same spot, just a few seconds apart. The first one with no zoom and the other one with the maximum (10x) zoom. It´s a part of the "skyline" of my Czech hometown :)
Quite impressive sharpness for such a long distance if you ask me. In fact, when playing with this function, I realized that the maximum zoom captures what I cannot even see with the naked eye so I can kind of use the phone as binoculars :)
I also tried some food / drink photography. Not bad but not much different from my old phone.
I was really curious about the macro function as I love to take close up pictures of flowers, insects and other cool little creatures. Here are some shots. Honestly, I cannot get rid of the feeling that the phone can actually do better than this, maybe I´m just not using the function in the most efficient way...
And a few more random shots from Krakow where I just spent a few days, showing my mum and my sister around the city where I once lived. The final picture is a kind of bonus for you as I don´t think you get to see two nuns chilling by a natural pool every day :) And if that´s not cool enough for you, let me also tell you that they actually got there on mountain bikes :) Krakow is literally packed with all kinds of churches and monasteries and seeing monks and nuns in situations like this is pretty common over there :)
So yeah, that´s it for my little cell phone camera review. It´s a bit ironic though. I finally got myself a phone with a decent camera but I desperately lack time to write posts :/ And it´s very likely that I will have to pause my activities here on Hive completely soon as I´m about to start a new job that will be extremely time consuming in the first weeks and months :( I really hope to write an update about it before I start tough.