【【Foreword: Redmi's new true flagship, destined to bring about change】】
As we all know, for the smartphone industry today, the word "flagship" has long been abused. On the one hand, basically as long as the performance of the high-end level of the industry at that time, the product will often be named "flagship". On the other hand, for some brands, even some of the mid-range, mid-to-low-end products are only more prominent in the same price point, and will also be added to the name of "flagship" for publicity.
Obviously, this is not a good phenomenon. But while the entire industry is almost abusing the title of "flagship", it has maintained a considerable degree of restraint on the concept of "true flagship", which is only one word away. Basically, only those in performance, workmanship, display, imaging... Even in terms of various features and functions, models that can achieve the industry's top level will be cautiously called "true flagships" by manufacturers.
In other words, although the "flagship" is now everywhere for consumers, as long as they see the "real flagship", then these models will inevitably have a perfect, no "pit" of the all-round top specifications, and all aspects can bring enjoyment of the use experience.
Of course, this often means that the price of such models is mostly more "touching". It wasn't until the evening of March 17, 2022, when Redmi unveiled the new K50 Pro, that we quickly realized that it might be destined to bring some changes to the "true flagship" segment.
【【【Product analysis: from performance to function, this time it piles up the specifications】】】
How strong is the Redmi K50 Pro? To understand this problem, let's first list some of its unusual technical specifications.
First of all, in the main control scheme, Redmi K50 Pro chose MediaTek's Tianji 9000. As the highly anticipated MediaTek 2022 true flagship 5G SoC, it has the best TSMC 4nm process in the industry, using the latest ARM v9 instruction set CPU and Mali-G710 MC10 GPU. At the same time, in the specifications of peripheral modules such as ISPs and NPUs, Tianji 9000 has also been upgraded to MediaTek's latest self-developed architecture.
Secondly, in terms of batteries, the Redmi K50 Pro is equipped with a 5000mAh single-cell large-capacity battery. At the same time, it also added a self-developed surging P1 charging chip, so as to achieve support for 120W "second charge" with a single battery. Of course, the 120W charging adapter itself is also directly included in the package.
In addition to this, in terms of screen configuration, the Redmi K50 Pro uses a 6.67-inch Samsung flexible AMOLED 2K screen. The resolution is as high as 3200 * 1440, the peak brightness is 1200nit, and each device has undergone the color calibration before leaving the factory, which is the so-called "primary color screen".
In order to make the comprehensive experience of this screen better, Redmi also equipped the K50 Pro with the screen color temperature adaptive function, which adapts to the highest 16,000 levels of automatic brightness in the industry, and also adds the DC anti-strobe dimming that many friends pay attention to.
Finally, in the image section, the Redmi K50 Pro front camera uses sony's IMX596 solution, which has a 20-megapixel and small enough center microvia design. In the rear camera part, it is equipped with a 108 million pixel Samsung HM2 main camera CMOS, with an 8 million pixel ultra-wide angle and a 2 million pixel independent macro to form a three-camera module. It is worth mentioning that the rear main camera of the Redmi K50 Pro also adds an optical image stabilization component, which also makes it the only model in the history of Redmi products with the largest main camera base, the highest pixels, and also with optical image stabilization.
It is not difficult to see that such specifications are "stacked" down, and the Redmi K50 Pro has actually achieved a fairly high level in the industry in terms of performance, fast charging, screen display, and imaging. In other words, it can undoubtedly be called the strongest "true flagship" of the Redmi brand to date.
So the question is, after sitting on such a luxurious configuration, how does the Redmi K50 Pro actually feel, and can it challenge the price barriers of other "true flagships"? If you're interested in this, read on.
【【Appearance appreciation: The color of the ink feather is quite cool, and the large battery is not heavy】】】
First of all, let's take a closer look at the design of the Redmi K50 Pro.
As you can see, we got the coolest version of the K50 Pro's four colors (ink feather, silver, magic mirror, glow) the coolest version.
Why is it called "Ink Feather"? Because in the upper half of the back, the K50 Pro uses a fairly deep bright black color, especially in the rear module part, the official announcement also uses the "Super Black" super black process, as far as possible to improve the absorbance of the material, just like the texture of "ink".
When you shift your gaze to the lower half of the machine's back, the decorative pattern composed of many reflective crystal-like textures will come into view.
Texture of the surface of a double-layer titanium cup (image from the web)
What is this texture? The official version is that its concept comes from an "olive meteorite", but we feel that it is actually closer to the handmade hammer pattern on the surface of the net red titanium cup. Of course, either way, it does look gorgeous and distinctive.
Of course, as the true flagship of Redmi, the K50 Pro's special feature in appearance is not only reflected in the color design of the back cover. In terms of solid materials, the Corning Gorilla Victus glass covered on the front of the fuselage with 2K AMOLED screen also gives it scratch resistance and drop resistance that meets the current industry's top level.
In addition to this, there is one more point that must be mentioned. That is, as a "stacked" model equipped with a flagship SoC, 5000mAh large-capacity battery, and still retains stereo speakers, independent infrared emission holes, and a full-featured NFC unit, the thickness and weight of the Redmi K50 Pro are only 8.48mm and 201g, respectively.
Although this is not much "thin and light", at the moment when many real flagships are generally close to half a kilogram, we have some glimpses of Redmi's intentions in the internal stacking structure of the fuselage.
【【Performance measurement: This time, Redmi played the Tianji 9000】】
After talking about the design, let's take a look at the performance of the Redmi K50 Pro this time.
As we all know, the K50 Pro uses MediaTek's Tianji 9000 solution this time. As the first true flagship 5G SoC launched after mediatek's re-emergence, the biggest feature of the Tianji 9000 is that it uses the best TSMC 4nm process, and is equipped with a Cortex-X2 super core with a main frequency of up to 3.05GHz, three Cortex-A710 large cores of 2.85GHz, and four Cortex-A510 small cores.
Among all the true flagship SoCs at present, the super core and large core frequency of the Tianji 9000 are the highest gears. Whether it is from the AIDA64 or GeekBench's running score, the Redmi K50 Pro has clearly played this "high frequency" advantage. As you can see, both the CPU single-core and multi-core results are already one of the highest records we have tested so far.
3DMARK Wild Life test
3DAMRK Wild Life Extreme test
In terms of GPU configuration, the Tianji 9000 uses the ARM Mali-G710 MC10 scheme this time. It is worth mentioning that because the Mali-G710 generation doubles the number of ALUs inside each computing unit, the number of stream processors in the MC10 is actually equivalent to the previous generation of G78 MC20. Judging from the 3DMARK running score, it also exceeds the Google Tensor SoC configured with the Mali-G78 MC20, which further confirms the doubling of the single-core performance of the new architecture GPU.
In addition, as the true flagship of Redmi's generation, the flash performance of the K50 Pro has also brought us a lot of surprises. While the continuous read and write speed isn't particularly impressive, the K50 Pro's flash performance is almost 50% or more higher than that of the current mainstream flagship models in terms of random reads and writes that have a greater impact on everyday performance. We speculate that this is either due to the use of better quality flash memory particles, or Redmi's optimization of the system's IO performance this time.
Finally, in the comprehensive test of the Antutu review, the 12+256GB Redmi K50 Pro we had at hand easily got more than 1.02 million points. It can be seen that its CPU, memory, and UX score have basically reached the highest level in the current industry, and there is no doubt that it is the "true flagship" performance in 2022.
【【【Gaming and Charging: High quality, high frame rate, low energy consumption, less than 20 minutes of fully charge】】
After reading the theoretical performance of the Redmi K50 Pro, I believe that everyone has no doubts about its top performance this time. Then, naturally, it is time to "test" this real flagship with actual games.
The first to appear is the popular "Original God". We manually adjusted all of its quality options to the maximum, turned off motion blur, and then recorded its runtime frame rate and power consumption with Perfdog.
It can be seen that the Redmi K50 Pro can maintain the frame rate of the highest quality "Original God" in the range of 55 frames to 60 frames, and maintain a considerable degree of stability. In this process, the peak power consumption of the Tianji 900 is 8.81W, but most of the time it is only about 7.5W, which is significantly lower than the current competitors.
Secondly, it is the racing game "Wild Drag Racing", which also uses high quality as the main selling point. In addition to the cutscenes in this game, the Redmi K50 Pro can also provide a very stable, near-full-frame smooth performance at a high-quality 60-frame setting. And we also noticed that at this time, its power consumption is even lower, fluctuating between about 3W and 4W, and the performance is quite amazing.
Finally, it is Ace Warrior, which has always been well adapted to high frame rates. We also turned on the frame rate and quality options to the maximum in the game, and turned off all the options for automatic frame reduction. It can be seen that it is completely difficult to redmi K50 Pro, not only the frame rate is stable at 120FPS throughout the process, but in addition to the instantaneous power consumption of 7.6W once, the power consumption recorded most of the time is only 3.3W or so, and the fuselage has always been only slightly warm.
In addition, we also tested the K50 Pro's charging speed of this 120W second charge. From our measured results, since the 2% charge, the K50 Pro has been charged with 32% of the power in the first 5 minutes, and the power has reached 82% after 15 minutes of charging, and it has been fully charged in only 19 minutes and 30 seconds.
It is particularly noteworthy that first of all, before the charge is charged to 90%, the 120W second charge of the Redmi K50 Pro can almost always maintain the output power above 100W, and there is no "shrinkage". Secondly, it is only with a single cell to achieve 120W fast charging support, and thus in order to cram into the not thick fuselage into the 5000mAh large capacity battery. Obviously, behind these two points, the contribution is the self-developed surging P1 charging chip. And its addition does help Redmi K50 Pro to achieve the current industry top level in terms of user experience in terms of battery life and fast charging.
【【[Image: Optical image stabilization and algorithm advancements let 100 million pixels unleash their potential]】】
It is not difficult to trace the models previously launched by Redmi, in fact, they have also launched a number of models with 108 million pixel main cameras in the past. Although these models have their own advantages in night shooting, zoom and other aspects, it may be somewhat debatable to say how "flagship" the comprehensive performance is.
Sample: Building ISO50 f1.9 0.0035s
Sample: Building (2x zoom) ISO50 f1.9 0.0035s
Sample: Building (5x zoom) ISO50 f1.9 0.0033s
Sample: Building (10x zoom) ISO50 f1.9 0.0086s
However, this time the Redmi K50 Pro has surprised us in many aspects of the image performance. First of all, as you can see, in our zoom test, we showed a fairly good "far-sighted" detail preservation ability, even in a 10x zoom scene, the resulting picture does not appear blurry.
But you should know that the Redmi K50 Pro does not have an independent telephoto sub-camera from the hardware, so all its "long-range" effects are essentially achieved by the main camera + algorithm. So the question is, why is this zoom effect brought by the K50 Pro main camera + algorithm particularly excellent?
The reason is simple, on the one hand, the K50 Pro's main camera has optical image stabilization, which allows it to reduce picture noise and improve image quality through more aggressive multi-frame compositing and longer exposure times in many cases. On the other hand, according to the official disclosure, the image algorithm is also optimized for this 108 million pixel main camera, which effectively improves the speed of photo processing, making it more difficult for users to detect the "intervention" of the algorithm.
Sample: Ornament ISO1291 f1.9 0.03s
100% magnified
Sample: Flower ISO110 f1.9 0.01s
It can be seen that with the blessing of the double redesign, the K50 Pro's main camera can achieve very good detail performance by default. At the same time, perhaps thanks to the great improvement of picture quality, the color orientation has become more reductive, and there is no longer a need to rely on strong colors to please the eyeballs. In a word, the adjustment of the camera is obviously more "confident".
Sample: Door knocker (night mode) ISO2919 f1.9 0.25s
Sample: Door knocker (100 million pixels) ISO12800 f1.9 0.07s
If you haven't seen anything after looking at the previous samples, then the K50 Pro's 100 million pixel sample shot at night is definitely enough to explain a lot of problems. While it's true that it's not as bright as the 9-in-1 night mode, the details aren't necessarily lost, and noise control is excellent.
Sample: Headphones (night mode) ISO2485 f1.9 0.05s
To be honest, the K50 Pro's main camera resolution is not only a high level that we have never seen on the Redmi model, but even in the entire industry, it has outperformed many "image flagship" models with images as a selling point and may be priced higher. To some extent, Redmi may have completely "eaten" the CMOS of HM2.
【【Summary: All-round flagship performance, or even just stacking】】
It is not difficult to see that compared with the K40 and K30 series that have achieved great success in the previous two years, the Redmi K50 Pro has made great progress in experience this time.
The new flagship SoC gives it top performance and energy efficiency ratio, the first 2K screen of the Cover brand brings significant progress in display delicacy and "sense of premium", the large-capacity battery and 120W fast charging meet the most demanding battery life needs, and the rapid improvement of image performance makes redmi K50 Pro instantly rank among the "image flagships".
Most importantly, when looking at these huge experience advances of the Redmi K50 Pro, it is clear that they are not the result of a simple "stacking". For example, the "compatibility" between 120W fast charging and large-capacity single-cell batteries comes from the key chips developed by self-development, and the excellent performance of the image part is inseparable from the accumulation of algorithms and tuning experience.
In this way, all this actually tells us that Today, Redmi not only has the hard power to make a "real flagship", but more importantly, they also have the soft power to do a good "real flagship". With the emergence of the K50 series, especially the K50 Pro, Redmi is also expected to reshape the value system of the industry's "true flagship", break more information asymmetries and price bubbles, and bring more changes to this top market segment as they did in the mainstream market.