Best camera smartphones with large main sensors

Smartphone cameras with large sensors — in the order of 100+ MP — are surprisingly common these days. You’ll find them on everything from budget smartphones to flagships, with vast differences in image quality despite using the same or similar sensors. These differences come down to lens quality, and more importantly, how these images are processed.

Whatever your requirements and budget, here are the top smartphones with 108MP cameras or larger.

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Best camera smartphones with large camera sensors

• Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra
• Redmi Note 13 5G
• Infinix Note 40X 5G
• OnePlus Nord CE3 Lite
• Google Pixel 9 Pro

Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra

The cream of the crop is, without question, the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra. With a monster 200MP primary camera, an array of high-resolution supporting cameras, and the incredibly fast processing of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 SoC, this is easily the best high-resolution camera phone you can get.

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The main camera captures 200MP images with a 24mm lens, a 50MP camera with a 5x periscope zoom, a 10MP telephoto with a 3x zoom, a 12MP ultra-wide camera, and a 12MP selfie camera. Better yet, the large sensors allow for up to 10x optical quality zoom (where the sensor is cropped), and a very usable 100x digital zoom that uses AI to upscale the image. The Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra is currently available for Rs 1,29,999.

Redmi Note 13 5G

It’s hard to believe that you can get a 108MP camera phone under Rs 15,000, but that’s exactly what you’re getting with the Redmi Note 13 5G. The phone features an impressive 108MP primary camera paired with an 8MP ultrawide and a 2MP depth sensor. 

The large sensor captures highly detailed images in good light, and lets you optically zoom up to 3x, thus doubling as a telephoto. There’s also a 16MP selfie camera that captures excellent portraits. The rest of the phone is no slouch either, as you get a 120Hz AMOLED display, up to 12GB RAM and 512GB storage. The processor is an octa-core MediaTek Dimensity 6080.

OnePlus Nord CE3 Lite

This may be a slightly older phone, but that only means that its flagship features are more affordable today. The OnePlus Nord CE3 Lite — is a beautiful phone and available in multiple colours.

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The primary camera is a 108MP unit and it’s paired with a 2MP macro and 2MP depth sensor. The front camera is also quite large as it captures 16MP selfies. Images captured on this phone are clean with a lot of detail, and they look great on the phone’s large, 6.67-inch, 120Hz LCD. The phone is quite powerful thanks to the use of a Qualcomm Snapdragon 695, so images are captured and processed quickly.

Infinix Note 40X 5G

If you’re looking for something even cheaper, consider the Infinix Note 40X 5G. This one also comes with a 108MP sensor, but drops the ultra-wide and depth cameras in favour of a 2MP macro. You also get a LCD display in place of an AMOLED, but storage is expandable by 1TB thanks to microSD card support. The Infinix Note 40X 5G is currently priced at Rs 12,999.

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Large-sensor camera phones are a great buy if you’re looking to capture more detail in your images. The likes of Samsung have of course pushed boundaries even further with their 200MP cameras, which are still a rarity. Hopefully we will see more phones with such sensors in the coming months. For now, these are the best large sensor phones you can get today.