Hot on the heels of the waves made by the recently announced Mi Mix Alpha, with its wrap-around display, and 108MP camera, a new report from XDA-Developers claims that Xiaomi is probably going to bring support for 8K video recording in its next flagship smartphone.
If you’re thinking that might make Xiaomi the first brand to have 8K recording on a smartphone, you’d be wrong — the Red Magic 3s and the Nubia Z20 can already shoot at 8K. However, they are limited to shooting 15FPS videos at 8K, while Xiaomi’s upcoming flagship, if it’s actually coming, will allow 30FPS videos at 8K, which is actually a useable frame rate for a video.
XDA discovered this feature during an APK teardown of the MIUI camera app from MIUI 11, where a string was spotted that mentioned 8K 30FPS video recording, alongside an icon for 8K 30FPS, which is likely what users will see displayed on their screens when they’re shooting videos in this resolution.
Whether Xiaomi actually does bring this feature with its next flagship, the bigger question, for me, is simply the storage concerns. 4K videos are already pretty heavy on storage, and with 8K videos, you’d not only need a lot of extra storage space, but also incredibly fast storage. The chances of this feature trickling down to other Xiaomi phones that aren’t necessarily their “flagships” seem low at this point, considering the added cost of high-end, fast memory that will be required for enabling 8K recording.
That said, the upcoming Snapdragon 865 should be able to handle 8K30FPS video shooting with its new ISP, so an upcoming flagship that makes use of that capability isn’t exactly far fetched at all.
