The Xiaomi Mi 11 is a pretty remarkable phone, with the accolade of being the first smartphone to run on Qualcomm’s latest flagship processor, the Snapdragon 888. Coupled with that, you’ll also be getting a 6.81″ AMOLED WQHD display with a 120Hz refresh rate, while Xiaomi also boasts about the “quad-curve” nature of the Mi 11’s screen. However, one of the more interesting features that’s available on the Mi 11 is the new “Night Video” mode, which was developed in collaboration with BlinkAI technologies.
Now, we haven’t had the chance to actually try out the Mi 11’s Night Video mode in person, but the folks over at BlinkAI have released two demo videos that show off the phone’s new feature. From what we can see, results are pretty impressive:
What do you think? Here’s another demo:
Of course, demo videos—particularly those that are released by companies that developed the technology showcased—can sometimes be skewed to highlight strong points. However, you can’t deny that the Night Video mode appears to work really well in low-light situations, adding brightness and detail to the shot without generating too much noise. In the clip above, I didn’t even notice the tree to the right of the frame until the night mode was enabled.
What’s so special about Night Video mode on the Mi 11?
According to BlinkAI, this is the first time that this particular AI technology has been used on a smartphone. Additionally, Dr Bo Zhu, co-founder and CTO at BlinkAI, explains that the Mi 11’s Night Video mode is “fundamentally different” from night modes on other smartphones. Here’s a quick snippet to explain this:
“While current nighttime photo taking solutions rely on capturing light over a long period and merging many frames to produce an enhanced photo, a different approach is needed for video’s real-time streaming. For video, each rapidly captured frame needs to be enhanced, and on top of that, the enhancement has to happen nearly instantly. Our unique machine learning solution can work with these very noisy, low-quality video frames, and improve it in milliseconds.”
The AI imaging enhancement software is built on a neural network framework, which supposedly emulates “critical aspects” of the human visual system. This supposedly offers the efficiency of “biological visual processing” to cameras, with the NPU on the Snapdragon 888 enabling “exceptional inference speed and imaging performance at ultra-low power”.
Does this mean that we’ll be seeing a similar feature on other phones in 2021? Perhaps. The Snapdragon 888 is Qualcomm’s latest flagship chipset, which means that it will probably power most premium Android smartphones in 2021. For now, the Mi 11 is the only smartphone with BlinkAI’s technology under the hood, so this adds to an already-impressive list of features on Xiaomi’s latest stab at the flagship smartphone market.
In any case, if you’re keen on the Mi 11, you might have to wait a little longer. The device has been announced for China at a price of CNY 4,699 (~RM2,914), but there has been no word on international availability just yet. For a more complete breakdown, scroll down to the related reading section below.
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