The Best Budget Smartphone

The Redmi Note series is loved by folks who want their money's worth. Bang for the buck, the best budget smartphone and all that sort of stuff, right?

₹32,999/mi.com/in

First things first, the price hike may be from inflation and part unavailability but Redmi Note 12 Pro+ does try to capture your attention with its 200MP camera lens. Yup, you read that right. There's a two hundred megapixel camera at the back. As far as megapixel count goes, more megapixels don't mean more detail. We tested the 200MP shot from the Redmi Note 12 Pro+ 5G against the 48MP RAW shot from Apple iPhone 14 Pro Max for reference. The Apple iPhone had more details, better composure, natural sharpness and was less compressed.

We have to point out that the Apple iPhone also costs a pant-soiling 1,39,900 so it's not a fair comparison but this is just a measure of how the megapixel count is pretty much pointless if your end result isn't utilising the full extent of that resolution. The photos on the 200MP mode are significantly crushed and compressed to what we expected.

Notable price hike

Our Redmi Note 12 Pro+ 5G review unit has 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage and a fat price tag of *32,999 if you can't cough up the discount offers from various banks. Is it worth the 10,000 price increase from the Redmi Note 11 series? It's note looking good...

Nothing to compare

Compared to the Nothing Phone (1). In terms of overall camera quality, both are matched equally. The Redmi does tend to overexpose the shadows to bring out more details. Once you zoom into the shot, the Redmi image looks artificially oversharpened than the Nothing Phone.