With concerts happening left to right, one of the things people love to do is to record snippets of the show using their phones. Ideally, you’ll need a phone with a telephoto camera–which is why Samsung’s Galaxy S Ultra series have been the top pick for concertgoers. I wished that midrange phones get a telephoto camera, and I’m happy to see that last year. In fact, you can get a phone decent enough for concerts at around Php 30k or even less.

Infinix, for their part, set the benchmark higher with the NOTE 50 Pro+ as the only midrange phone we know that has a periscope camera for under Php 20k. With such an affordable price tag, I had questions: can it take good videos? Is the digital zoom decent? Is post processing fast? That’s what I had to find out when I brought along the NOTE 50 Pro+ to NMIXX’s Fan Meet last May 2.

To recap, the NOTE 50 Pro+ has a 50-megapixel periscope camera with 3x optical zoom, an 8-megapixel ultrawide camera, and a main camera that has OIS and uses an IMX896 sensor. Paired with top-end internals like a Dimensity 8350 processor, 12GB LPDDR5X RAM, and 256GB UFS 4.0, the NOTE 50 Pro+ seems to be THE best midrange phone for content creation. Does it deliver?

Starting with the main camera, the IMX896 is a tried-and-tested sensor, and the Dimensity 8350 had enough muscle to maximize its capabilities. Colors are on point, and exposure was accurate when I used it during the fan meet. My only complaint would be the autofocus being a hit or miss affair at times–which was solved by enabling AF/AE lock before shooting.

Using the main camera for video, it’s nice to have support for 60FPS recording at 4K resolution to make the footage more fluid. Stabilization was not a problem with the built-in OIS, but there’s the occasional out of focus that’s resolved using AF/AE lock. Exposure is good with the NOTE 50 Pro+’s main camera, balancing the exposure between the LED walls and the members of NMIXX.

While the main camera’s performance is expected to be great, I was blown away with the capabilities of its periscope camera. With a price of Php 18k, I was expecting several limitations–but the NOTE 50 Pro+ delivered. These photos I took are at 6x hybrid zoom, and the image quality is as good as the periscope cameras of more expensive phones. While I had to adjust exposure occassionally, the NOTE 50 Pro+’s shutter was responsive that I barely had any shots that were blurred. Compared to the main camera, I noticed that the autofocus of the periscope camera performed better.

With both cameras, the NOTE 50 Pro+ did its best effort to capture audio properly despite SMX MOA’s terrible bass-drowning acoustics. This is one of the challenges I faced with the NOTE 50 Pro+, and maybe Infinix could introduce audio recording tweaks in future updates.

Adding up to the feats this midrange phone has is that you can also shoot 60FPS video at 4K resolution with the periscope camera. While the digital zoom on video is not as good as with photo, the NOTE 50 Pro+’s 3x optical zoom was enough for my needs during the fan meet.

There’s a slight crop when shooting at 4K, so the footage appears to be more compressed than in Full HD, which is a good thing especially if you need that extra reach and don’t want to resort to digital zoom. Like the main camera, I had to manually adjust exposure with the periscope camera to get the best possible footage from it. Save from that, stabilization is decent and autofocus performed better compared to the main camera.

Between the main and periscope camera, I’m more impressed with the capabilities of the latter for its price. While it is not perfect and has room for improvement especially with post-processing, I recommend the NOTE 50 Pro+ as a budget option for concerts. As it holds, the NOTE 50 Pro+ is a frontrunner for midrange phone for the year, and I’m excited to see other brands compete with Infinix’s best offering to date.