The successively released Meilan 5, Meilan Note5 and Meilan 5s are equipped with 13 million pixels and F2.2 aperture that support phase focusing, but the sensor model is unknown. Their sensors may be the same, but SoC, ISP and system tuning are different. The main purpose of this comparison is to see if there will be any obvious difference in taking photos of these machines with different prices and time periods. Because the standard sample uses Samsung's Galaxy Note5, you can compare the gap between the current 1000 yuan machine and the flagship.
It should be noted in advance that the quality control of the 1000 yuan machine is not as good as that of the flagship machine, and individual differences may lead to large deviations in the comparison results. This is dedicated to the users who are struggling to buy Meilan and are interested in it.
Investigation items and scales
The core of mobile phone photographing is the photographing experience and imaging effect. The main factors that affect the experience are:
The shooting smoothness and film consistency: whether the shooting frame has problems such as delay/shadow dragging/frame dropping/full screen noise;
Speed, including focusing speed, shutter response and imaging speed;
Film forming rate, the rate of destruction by shaking hands;
The degree of automation, whether to identify the scene with large light difference and weak light, and automatically trigger HDR and night view mode;
The imaging effects mainly include:
White balance and light metering. In many scenes such as sunlight/light/weak light and extremely weak light, whether the white balance (picture color and wind direction) and brightness can be close to the naked eye;
Discriminatory power, roughly understood as clarity, should take into account the sharpness, detail and natural degree of the picture at the same time;
Tolerance, that is, the ability to show details in the light and dark at the same time. For mobile phones, this is basically equivalent to whether the HDR effect is natural and harmonious, whether there are ghosts, white balance deviation, and poor discrimination after synthesis;
The remaining assessment contents include noise control, color saturation (the closer to the naked eye, the better, but Samsung and Huawei will be able to raise it recently to please users), lens quality (including edge degradation control, anti glare, fog control, wide-angle and pillow deformation control, etc.), and many other contents.
Although everyone's requirements for the photographic experience are almost the same, for different users, the proportion of different items in the imaging part is completely different. For example, the Maoist Party, who likes to zoom in and scan, will definitely put discrimination first, and the proportion is very high; The party in the circle of friends attaches great importance to tolerance, white balance, saturation and other items, but the requirement of discrimination is not high. Therefore, the comparison will be divided according to different items, and it will be better for everyone to focus on understanding what they care about.
Photo experience
In comparison, the three machines are all flyme5, and their photographic experience is the same. The only thing is that the shutter response, imaging and HDR speed of Meilan Note5 are faster, and Meilan 5s and Meilan 5 are obviously a gear slower. In addition, the Flyme 5 app has not added fast exposure adjustment and automatic HDR (this is Meizu's "tradition", even PRO 6 Plus does not have...). In addition, manual metering and HDR have a high probability of causing the metering to be slightly brighter, and the overall photography experience is poor.
In terms of focusing speed and success rate, Meilan Note5 is slightly better and Meilan 5s is the worst, but there is little difference between the three machines. Although it is a thousand yuan machine, the huge technical gap of the phase focusing technology itself makes its actual performance better than those flagship phones that did not have phase focusing a few years ago: the performance is relatively normal in the daytime, but the situation of pulling the bellows is relatively easy to occur in large depth scenes or weak light scenes such as outdoor lights.
The most influential factor in their photographic experience is the film rate. The film rate of Meilan 5 and Meilan 5s is only a fraction of that of Meilan Note5. Especially when the light becomes weak, it is easy to paste films manually. On the whole, the photo taking experience of the three models is at the normal level of domestic models at the same price.
HDR
For mobile phones, automatic HDR is the most important daily function, but it needs good algorithm and hardware support. Many domestic manufacturers have not yet lowered the automatic HDR function in consideration of cost. Even the automatic HDR function itself has not yet been popularized in thousand yuan mobile phones. Meizu is one of the few manufacturers that has not joined the automatic HDR even the flagship. In addition, the HDR algorithm itself is not very perfect, resulting in the low availability of the actual HDR of the three Meilan series machines. Compared with restoring reality, its level is just trying to retain more details of bright parts.
Meilan 5s normal mode and HDR mode comparison (daytime sample)
Comparison between Meilan 5s normal mode and HDR mode (Sample of indoor lighting)
Comparison between MB5 normal mode and HDR mode
Comparison between the normal mode and HDR mode of Meilan Note5
Lens quality&wide angle&edge degradation
Enlarge the most edge at the bottom right corner of the screen
wide-angle: Meizu and Sony are both manufacturers who prefer to use large wide-angle lenses. Meizu, from the flagship to the Meilan series, almost all use lenses with equivalent focal length of about 24mm (generally 28-29mm wide-angle for mobile phones). The field of vision is significantly larger than that of normal mobile phones. The advantage of wide-angle lens is that it is convenient to take pictures, and it can shoot all objects at a very close distance, but the cost is that the number of pixels shared by the same scene will decrease (the same pixel will shoot more things), thus affecting the discrimination. Secondly, the wide-angle lens will lead to weaker virtualization effect, and more difficult to control the edge distortion and degradation.
Edge deterioration: The cost of taking good photos is very high, which is the first project to be abandoned in the cost of 1000 yuan machine control. In addition to sensors, lenses are also a shrinking disaster area. Meilan series has just fully adopted lens coating, which can effectively prevent the lens from being easily stained by fingerprints.
However, the Meilan 5s engineering machine we got has an incorrect optical axis, and the area on the left side of the picture will "fix the virtual focus", so all the following sample comparisons will avoid the left side of the picture. In addition, the corner and edge distortion of its picture is also the most serious of the three Magic Blues. You can find that the corner and edge of the picture will be blurred when you slightly zoom in. The most unexpected thing is that the image distortion of the Meilan 5 is slight among the three Meilan models, but there is still a clear gap between the flagship and the Meilan 5.
White balance/metering/discrimination/noise control
PS： The focus of the proofs is in the middle, and they are magnified in the center. Click the picture to view the large picture. The samples are arranged from strong to weak light:
Daytime Scenario 1
Daytime scene 1 center right zoom in
Daytime scene 2 center right
Daytime scene 2 central zoom in
Daytime scenario 3
Light Scene 1
Light Scene 2
Light Scene 2 Center Enlarged
Light Scene 3
Light Scene 3 Center Enlarged
Light Scene 4
Light Scene 4 Center Enlarged
Light Scene 5
Light Scene 5 Center Enlarged
Weak light scene 1
Weak light scene 1 central amplification
Weak light scene 2 upper right corner
Weak light scene 2 central amplification
Weak light scene 3
Weak light scene 3 central amplification
Weak light scene 4
Weak light scene 4 central amplification
The three Meilan series mobile phones have no significant white balance and metering deviation in the daytime, and their performance is similar to that of Samsung Note5. In the light and weak light scenes, Magic Blue 5 is the one that is closest to Note 5 in most scenes in terms of light measurement and white balance, and its performance is far better than expected. The Meilan 5s may think that the engineering machine or the newly released machine has a short time, and the white balance adjustment is far less stable than the other two Meilan models, so there is a high probability that the problem of blue and cold will occur.
For a mobile phone, the number of pixels is fixed. The larger the wide-angle, the lower the number of pixels for the same scene, which affects the discrimination. The wide-angle lenses of Meilan series are doomed to have poor ultimate discrimination, but their actual performance is better than expected. The ultimate discrimination in the daytime will not be too far away from the 16 million pixel Note5.
When the light weakens, Meizu adds a more forceful noise reduction smear, and almost no big noise can be seen, but some details will disappear. Although their weak light discrimination is far less than that of the flagship machine, the Meilan 5 has defeated its peers again, and most scenes have better performance.
On the whole, the lowest priced Meilan 5 is the best performing model. The performance in daytime and low light is better than that of the other two Meilan models. Although Meilan 5s is only half a generation behind, its white balance and discrimination are not at the same starting line at all. This is probably because the testing machine software has not been adjusted well, but the gap in camera quality is real.
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