Recently, Realme released an important smartphone in the affordable flagship segment – the Realme X3 Superzoom. Probably from its name you’ve already guessed what strength it holds. Yes, the phone is called SuperZoom because it has incredible zooming capability.
We have seen how Realme has successfully launched special smartphones with incredible pricing. And the X3 Superzoom is no exception. Usually, smartphones equipped with super camera combinations supporting 5x optical zoom are pretty expensive but the new Realme model stands out from its competition.
While it seemed that high resolution zooming cameras would be exclusive to expensive flagships, the Realme X3 SuperZoom tries to change this trend by bringing it to the upper mid-range segment.
We have already posted the Realme X3 SuperZoom hands on a few days back but now let’s take a closer look at the device and its cameras. In this X3 SuperZoom camera review, we try to check whether the powerful cameras do justice to its specs in real-life performance.
Realme X3 SuperZoom Display
Before talking about its camera, let’s look at its display. We think it’s unfair to the phone if we don’t take about its 120Hz refresh rate, even if it’s not on the first page of Realme official advertisement. But it’s an LCD display which doesn’t allow to have an in-screen fingerprint reader — so you have to use a side-mounted fingerprint-enabled power button. The pixel arrangement is quite similar to what we’ve seen on the other 120Hz LCD display. Compared to most mid-rangers that feature a 60Hz display, the X3 superzoom offers much better fluidity.
Realme X3 SuperZoom Camera Review
As for its camera, the X3 Superzoom features a 64MP main camera with a Samsung GW1 sensor which was announced at the end of last year. Another highlight is the top 8MP telephoto camera. It supports up to 5x Optical zooming and 60x hybrid zooming. To guarantee its stability, the telephoto camera has OIS anti-shake. The other two cameras are an 8MP wide-angle shooter and a 2MP macro camera.
Let’s check out whether this combination works well in real life.
First, let’s see some samples from the primary camera. The original high-resolution sensor shot samples with pretty good detail and clarity. And under good light conditions, the samples had excellent exposure and white balance. An interesting feature for the Realme camera app is its AI color dazzle mode. It’s similar to the vivid color mode on other phones. But at the same time, the Realme model could adjust the colors in a smarter way of AI recognition. The color reproduction is lively with higher saturation than the originals.
But a problem is that though the photos shot by the main camera had impressive contrast, the dynamic range of the photos didn’t satisfy us as the dark areas lost some detail and had some noise.
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And then we try to see how it performs in night scenes. From the samples, we could see significant brightness improvement and the exposure balance between brightness and shadow. In the aspect of noise reduction, it managed to smoothen the dark scenes in the images at the software level. But if you look closer, we could see some blurring marks left by software tuning.
Now let’s talk about the samples shot by the wide-angle camera. Although the 8MP resolution now is not the best option for a smartphone’s wide-angle camera, the wide-angle samples of the Realme X3 Superzoom still have decent colors and good anti-distortion. And the X3 also had the same problem on the wide-angle camera as most phones — it didn’t do well on removing color fringing in the image.
And let’s move to another camera, the macro camera. Well, it’s almost one of the standard setups for Realme’s models. And as usual, the Realme Macro samples maintained a pretty good production in really close shooting distance.
There are a few smartphones that have 5x optical zoom but this model is the first mid-ranger that actually features 60x digital zoom capability. The Realme X3 SuperZoom covered almost the same shooting range as the Huawei’s latest P40 Pro flagship – from 0.6x to 5x optical zoom, and even longer digital zoom as well.
We also compared it with the P40 Pro’s zooming samples. For the 5x zoom option, although the X3 Superzoom samples have lower resolution than Huawei’s samples, Realme’s zooming samples have pretty good color representation and better color contrast. When we zoom up to 10x, the resolution strength of the Huawei’s model is more significant. But here we have to praise the Realme X3 Superzoom for the OIS anti-shaking, which allowed us to shoot the clear zoomed-in photos with my hand.
You can get the original camera samples from this drive link.
It’s clear that Realme X3 Superzoom’s biggest strength is its telephoto camera with 5x optical zoom – unseen on smartphones in its price range. So we had to check how good the Realme X3 Superzoom camera was, especially when compared to the best in the market – the Huawei P40 Pro.
The samples showed us that the Realme model did not fall very behind in quality. The cameras are not a gimmick and perform really well for a device in its price range.
So if you want an affordable smartphone with powerful zooming capability, the Realme X3 SuperZoom won’t disappoint you!
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