How can I force my 48Mpix Android camera phone to save images at full resolution?

Question

I have a Mi A3 phone camera. This has a 48Mpix sensor, but I am disappointed in the detail captured compared to, for example, a Sony phone with a 12Mpix sensor.

Now what I notice from image properties in Mi A3 is despite the camera being 48 Mpix, when it is normally taking pics it is taking them as lower resolution per some interinal pre-defined logic. The image captured is 7Mp, 9 MP, or 12 Mp — and this is not in my control.

I want to know how can I capture photos with 12Mp or higher resolution from Mi phone always. I want to capture more information in images than the phone's default camera captures.

A friend of mine suggested to use Google camera app from https://getdroidtips.com/download-google-camera-for-mi-a3-apk-download/ to have stable megapixels all the time as I face the problem above.

Answer 1

I have a Xiaomi Note 7 with likely the same 48Mpix sensor. It take 12Mpix pictures by default (a group of 2x2 pixels is averaged and taken as a single pixel, this is called pixel-binning). There is an option in the camera to take 48Mpix pictures (it appears only in "Pro" mode). I won't use it often because the results are worse than with the 12Mpix setting(*): the "native" 12Mpix picture is better than the 48Mpix one scaled down to 12Mpix. My guess is there is a lot more noise in the sensor data and the camera has to do a lot more processing.

(*) at least in the bleak November light we have in Paris. One a bright sunny day, perhaps...