Mr Craig mounted it wrong btw

https://twitter.com/UniverseIce/status/1536330945904939008

Putting so little effort (if any) in making photo outcomes equal should be forbidden. You literally can't describe the processing of S22 Ultra as a whole, because the variants are completely different.

They're a huge corp, at their disposal are DSPs, GPUs, CPUs and most basically ISP tuning itself. With proper work, basing on the ISP alone, they could reach barely distinguishable difference (at least without looking very close). With help of external block and implementing true raw processing, they could absolutely reach the same kind of output, using the same processing code.
What's more crazy is that it isn't the first generation of Samsung flagships with drastic photo differences.

Nothing phone (1) buyers explaining how awesome the animated rear LEDs are
https://youtu.be/mrkAmmMakMg

My POV: Nothing is yet to prove itself as company providing anything but uncommon design, it's very likely that dev-side stuff won't go any further than OnePlus (despite Nothing *NOT* being owned by Oppo nor BBK as a whole). Squashed kernel source and its extensions and pretty much no other public resources is what I personally expect.

My Hanlon's razor is full of doubt. Nothing would really have to hire highly incompetent people for them to misinterpret SoC characteristics so much. Otherwise it's just a lie they (rightfully) thought nobody big is going to undermine.

https://www.inputmag.com/tech/exclusive-nothing-phone-1-mid-range-snapdragon-778g-plus-chip

For reference: the plus stands for only the boosted CPU and GPU clocks, while they absolutely contradict themselves by saying that "Qualcomm added features just for this phone" just right after a sentence claiming they belong to the SoC. As much as we can't rule out whether Qualcomm helped in design past offering the QRD as basis, charging features mostly belong to the PMIC of choice. If anything real world can be concluded from their words, it's that it's likely that their PMICs are solely Qualcomm-made, which is pretty typical in the industry when OEM doesn't target higher BOM cuts or features going beyond Qualcomm's offering.

(sure, it also can be that inputmag people misinterpreted a very vague response from Nothing, that would satisfy Hanlon's razor the most)

That would be the fourth message in short period of time, but an absolute rule for any competent writers: always put the whole statements in text. As much as no one can forbid your writing just because of your lack of insight, that doesn't mean you can't be more transparent to the reader. It really helps in accountability, when the slip isn't on your side, but on the quoted entity.

If you thought that physical pixel pitch of IMX989 is 1.6μm, you're wrong. As an 8PD sensor, its physical design is shared with Samsung's S5KGN series, meaning there's 100 million photosites at 0.8x1.6μm. Thanks for tuning in.

Wait, Xiaomi, you spent millions on engineering a sensor that was already in a Sharp in May?

For reference, as I really invite anyone motivated to dig further:
https://twitter.com/yamada845/status/1544953205427081216

Smartphones are a commodity, and that's how you can get away with a lot, as media outlets oriented at mainstream consumers aren't interested nor have the research abilities and incentives to spend effort on something that won't get them lots of recognition, and therefore money. This way, OEM claims are taken as is, without question, despite their notorious bending of reality, tricky use of words, if not outright lying.

Take for example top of the line laptops, top of the line keyboards, cameras, PC, historical PDAs, and then the opinions, prevalent forms of tests surrounding them. The atmosphere that you'll see will be way more professional, way more granular. Someone who does rather common tests there will look like a collosal professional in comparison to an average smartphone review around. And that's the entire thing: what's written is dictated by whoever reads.

Heh
https://twitter.com/nothing/status/1546523430111121409

To anyone thinking that tele modules are boring and better replaced with an UWA...
https://youtu.be/EbydKP8P8fg

Aaand welcome to the squashed kernel source:
https://github.com/NothingOSS

Xiaomi's high res mode not there yet, although except the moire issues, it's also closer to good than to bad.
Unless it's a result of QB-unaware processing (simple on-sensor remosaicing), they could tune it slightly to try a bit less to extract color details, and then scaling it down to 12 MP (or slightly more) would squeeze out the natural sharpness.
https://fdn.gsmarena.com/imgroot/reviews/22/xiaomi-12s-ultra/daylight/gsmarena_166.jpg

What else matters on the sample (not the crop which I posted) is that lens is clearly better than average when it comes to sharpness of the edges. I won't credit their branding contractor Leica for this, but it seems someone actually cared to avoid a total joke of the main marketing point of the phone.

Could say it deserves some praise, considering it's a fresh sensor format, without a crop/multi-aspect use of it, and yet the thing that is typically bad in this scenario got handled well.

For reference, the high res mode king
https://fdn.gsmarena.com/imgroot/reviews/21/huawei-mate-x2/camera/gsmarena_080.jpg