Forget Samsung Super Zoom: new Android flagship brings revolutionary telephoto camera

We're heading toward the end of 2023, and you may think that all smartphone launches are now behind us, but a couple of Chinese companies have taken the challenge to prove you wrong! We're expecting the official reveal of the Nubia Red Magic 9 Pro and the Honor 100 series, as well as the subject of today's article, the Realme GT5 Pro.

Now, those of you who follow the Chinese smartphone market closely already know that the vanilla GT5 version went official in the Far East on September 4, but since then Realme has been teasing the Pro model as an industry-changing device. Today, on its official Weibo page, Realme lifted a part of that curtain, showing some of the camera capabilities of the Realme GT5 Pro. And it seems that the Galaxy S24 Ultra now has a real competitor on the horizon. Will the S24 Ultra Super Zoom survive this upcoming battle?

Let's see what we extracted from this little, bizarre camera announcement.

Hail the new telephoto king?

The main talking point of the announcement was the periscope telephoto camera of the GT5 Pro. It features an IMX890 sensor made by Sony with a 1/1.56 size and a 50MP resolution, coupled with QBC (Quad Bayer coding where four adjacent pixels capture one color only) and pixel 4-1 pixel binning on top of that. This sensor was unveiled a year ago as a capable upper-midrange solution, primarily for the main camera of upper-midrangers and even some flagships, such as the OnePlus 11.