This year, Xiaomi’s 12S Ultra shook the mobile world by introducing the largest sensor ever put into a smartphone. As a result, many people may have heard the phrase “1-inch sensor” for the first time and simply assumed it meant what you’d expect. Unfortunately, the camera space is peculiar, and one inch does not always mean one inch in a literal sense.
Enter JerryRigEverything, the YouTube channel known for its smartphone teardowns. This time, we get it as well as a sensor measurement competition. Armed with a couple of one-inch pieces of paper, Zack set out to bravely tear down the 12S Ultra in order to discover something we already told you in our review a couple of weeks ago, which is common knowledge in the camera world: “1 inch” can be a shorthand way of saying “1 inch type,” which does not mean it measures precisely one inch on any side or diagonally.
So, every company that makes cameras or smartphones is “deceiving” if you expect things to measure exactly what they say they do in inches. This problem has been going on for a long time, and unfortunately, no company that makes cameras, camera sensors, or smartphones has any reason to fix it. So we’ll just have to get used to the fact that sometimes an inch isn’t an inch.
