Ever since Xiaomi showcased their prototype Xiaomi 15 Pro with an attachable fixed lens Micro4/3 sensor module, people have drawn comparisons with Sony's DSC QX series of "Lens Style Cameras" and also with past efforts from Samsung like Galaxy NX lineup.

Let me explain how Xiaomi's solution is significantly more advanced than what Sony did with the QX series. Like the name suggests the QX series from Sony was a series of actual standalone cameras simply without a viewfinder and grip. It has the sensor, E-mount, batteries, processor and microSD storage, it's a full camera on it's own. It could be mounted to any phone using a clamp and would simply stream the preview to the phone's screen using Sony's app. That's it. The phone acted as the viewfinder and control for the exposure settings. You click the shutter, which makes the QX camera take the photo like any Sony mirrorless camera and transfer the image using WiFi Direct to the phone. The QX30/10/100/1 are basically standalone cameras.

What makes the Xiaomi special is the fact that the phone's ISP directly interacts with the actual MFT sensor on the module through a 10Gbps connection, giving it access to some of the most advanced modern image processing techniques! Think about multi-exposure stacked HDR, possible night mode, enhanced portrait mode etc. It's not possible to take clean looking/detailed night shots using a real camera unless you are hulking around a big f1.4 lens, it's not possible to take portrait mode shots with really shallow DOF and good compression unless you are carrying a large 85mm f1.8 lens – with computational photography + large MFT sensor will theoretically enable some of the best fake portrait mode shots/HDR/night mode images! That's exactly how Xiaomi is able to eke out 16 stops of DR from the MFT sensor module.

These two are not even remotely the same. They just look similar.

This is truly the first time we are seeing an MFT sensor + modern image signal processing!

Compared to the Samsung Galaxy NX, it's closer. Galaxy NX1 was a full on APSC mirrorless camera with the guts of a Galaxy S4 (I think), but in the early 2010s, computational photography was practically non-existent, or ISPs weren't fast enough to process APSC sensor data or they simply didn't want to apply any processing as such. Mirrorless cameras were still in it's infancy and Canon/Nikon DSLRs ruled the market. Samsung left the market while Sony stuck to it and both were later on successful in their own fields.

One small gripe regarding the Xiaomi: They could've exposed the MFT mount, so that we could attach any MFT lens from different brands like Leica, Panasonic, Olympus, Sigma etc. May be they did that to save space.

Thanks for reading!