Black Shark 5 Pro vs Black Shark 4 Pro — Gaming Smartphone Comparison

Black Shark 4 Pro from Xiao­mi came out in 2021 and got the title of the killer of gam­ing smart­phones. 12 months lat­er, the Chi­nese giant has released a new “black shark” — Black Shark 5 Pro. We fig­ured out how much the new prod­uct is more pro­duc­tive than the fourth ver­sion, what has changed in design and con­struc­tion, how gam­ing flag­ships dif­fer from Xiao­mi.

The Black Shark series bets on the com­bi­na­tion of per­for­mance and design. Pho­to: profile.ru

Char­ac­ter­is­tics
Design
Dis­play
Proces­sor and per­for­mance
Bat­tery
Oper­at­ing sys­tem
Cam­era
con­clu­sions

Characteristics

The main updates affect­ed the proces­sor, cam­era and oper­at­ing sys­tem. Black Shark 4 Pro, despite the pow­er­ful stuff­ing, is not a super-expen­sive device. In ver­sion 5, Xiao­mi has raised the stakes — in hard­ware and price. What came of it — fur­ther in the mate­r­i­al.

Design

The Black Shark 4 Pro has a com­pro­mise style. The device has a pre­mi­um glass design, an LED tri­an­gle indi­ca­tor. The sig­na­ture X‑shaped design of the back cov­er mag­i­cal­ly attracts the eye, in cer­tain light­ing it cre­ates a 3D effect. The 4 Pro does not pro­duce the impres­sion of a “space” gam­ing smart­phone: every­thing is con­cise and mod­er­ate.

Instead of gam­ing whim­si­cal ideas — under­lined ele­gance. Pho­to: voi.id

Xiao­mi has relied on the con­struc­tive know-how of the Black Shark series — mag­net­ic trig­gers. These small addi­tion­al but­tons are called up by light­ly press­ing the side key. Trig­gers help to aim, switch func­tions in games. In non-game sit­u­a­tions, the but­tons are use­ful for tak­ing screen­shots, acti­vat­ing the cam­era, etc.

The devel­op­ers also left the clas­sic 3.5 mm head­phone jack. The fash­ion for wire­less sys­tems is grow­ing, but for a gamer, trans­mis­sion of sound with­out delay is impor­tant for the gam­ing expe­ri­ence. Wired head­phones can do just that. Wire­less — only at a stretch and for a lot of mon­ey.

Trig­gers are rat­ed for at least 1 mil­lion clicks. Pho­to: tikgadget.com

Black Shark 5 did not break the visu­al trends of the series. Design with­out pre­ten­tious and flashy ideas, but with a beau­ti­ful design. Satin-fin­ish back cov­er with a sketchy pat­tern, brand­ed RGB indi­ca­tor — the new “shark” is dis­creet­ly spec­tac­u­lar. The design of the cam­era block has changed. In ver­sion 4, the mod­ules were placed hor­i­zon­tal­ly, in ver­sion 5, the design­ers returned to the clas­sic square shape. A sim­ple and rig­or­ous solu­tion.

Trig­gers have been improved. In ver­sion 5, their acti­va­tion requires press­ing with great effort. This has saved gamers from acci­den­tal advance­ment and unnec­es­sary trig­ger­ing.

Black Shark 5 added in style, but remained with­in the frame­work of a sin­gle con­cept of the series. Pho­to: trashbox.ru

Display

The Black Shark 4 Pro fea­tures an advanced 6.67-inch Super AMOLED dis­play with a 20:9 aspect ratio. The last para­me­ter gave a big plus to ergonom­ics. The dis­play is con­ve­nient to use with one hand, unlike mod­els with a sim­i­lar screen, but with an 18:9 ratio (for exam­ple, the iPhone 13 Pro Max).

The 720Hz sam­pling rate made the Black Shark 4’s dis­play super respon­sive. Laten­cy (time from touch­ing the screen to response) is only 8.3 ms. This is a crit­i­cal indi­ca­tor for games where the result of the race (bat­tles, tasks) depends on the reac­tion speed of the dis­play. The max­i­mum refresh rate of 144Hz added smooth­ness for com­fort­able gam­ing.

The dis­play of the Black Shark 5 Pro is sim­i­lar to the dis­play of ver­sion 4. Sim­i­lar res­o­lu­tion (1080 x 2400) and aspect ratio (20:9). The type of dis­play has changed — OLED was installed instead of AMOLED. Tech­ni­cal­ly, AMOLED is a lit­tle bet­ter, but in prac­tice it does not affect any­thing. OLED screen Black Shark 5 Pro — with rich col­ors with the option of cal­i­bra­tion.

The main dif­fer­ence between the dis­plays is in bright­ness. The max­i­mum per­for­mance of the Black Shark 5 Pro has increased by 14% com­pared to the Black Shark 4 Pro. On a smart­phone, it is even more com­fort­able to play out­doors under the sun. The oper­a­tion of the auto-bright­ness sys­tem caus­es a wow effect. In ver­sion 5, the back­light of the dis­play reacts to changes in light­ing very smooth­ly and gen­tly, with­out a sharp tran­si­tion.

The Black Shark 5 Pro’s dis­play wins out in the sun. Oth­er­wise, both screens are 100% made for gam­ing. Pho­to: zdnet.com

Processor and performance

Released in March 2021, Black Shark 4 Pro is based on the cut­ting-edge proces­sor of the time — Snap­drag­on 888 with a fre­quen­cy of 2840 MHz and 8 cores. The pow­er reserve was enough for the game in 2022. Demand­ing titles like Gen­shin Impact, ARK: Sur­vival Evolved won’t go below 60 FPS on medi­um or medi­um-high set­tings. Every­thing works smooth­ly and playably. Cool­ing done right. Even after intense gam­ing, the Black Shark 4 Pro does not get hot­ter than 42 degrees.

In the pop­u­lar Geek­bench syn­thet­ic CPU test, the smart­phone scores 1111 points in sin­gle-core and 3675 points in mul­ti-core modes. In these terms, the Black Shark 4 Pro is almost as good as the One Plus 9 and Sam­sung S21, although these devices are more expen­sive.

The over­all per­for­mance of the smart­phone is eval­u­at­ed. The Black Shark 4 Pro remains com­pet­i­tive in 2022. Pho­to: geekbench.com

Black Shark 5 Pro received the lat­est Snap­drag­on 8 Gen 1 proces­sor. The same 8 cores, but with a max­i­mum fre­quen­cy of 3000 MHz. A new Adreno 730 video accel­er­a­tor was installed. Black Shark 5 Pro made a break­through: on aver­age, a smart­phone is 26% more pow­er­ful than its pre­de­ces­sor. With any game tasks, the “black shark” ver­sion 5 copes with­out hes­i­ta­tion. Gen­shin Impact, Call of Duty Mobile and oth­er heavy games lit­er­al­ly fly at high set­tings with a sta­ble 60 FPS. Tests on ultra set­tings cause the proces­sor to throt­tle a lit­tle (the pic­ture shakes a lit­tle), but the FPS does not drop.

The cool­ing sys­tem of the Black Shark 5 Pro is based on dual liq­uid cool­ing plates. Cop­per ele­ments suc­cess­ful­ly dis­si­pate heat so that the smart­phone does not expe­ri­ence over­heat­ing dur­ing games. The max­i­mum tem­per­a­ture on the tests is 40 degrees.

In sin­gle-core and mul­ti-core test­ing, the Black Shark 5 Pro out­per­forms the Sam­sung Galaxy S22 Ultra. The gap from ver­sion 4 Pro is also clear­ly vis­i­ble.

The Black Shark 5 Pro has few com­peti­tors in its price seg­ment. Pho­to: geekbench.com

Battery

Black Shark 4 Pro is equipped with a 4500 mAh bat­tery. The device lives on a sin­gle charge for 3–5 hours with active work. Charg­ing speed is amaz­ing: thanks to Hyper­Charge tech­nol­o­gy and 120W of pow­er, the bat­tery goes from 0 to 100% in just 19 min­utes! In the process, the body heats up decent­ly, but this is a price to pay for speed.

The bat­tery of the Black Shark 5 Pro has changed slight­ly. The capac­i­ty increased to 4650 mAh accel­er­at­ed charg­ing up to 18 min­utes, extend­ed the oper­at­ing time by 10–20 min­utes.

Hyper­Charge will charge your smart­phone while you drink cof­fee at lunch. Pho­to: chiemtaimobile.vn

Operating system

The pro­pri­etary Joy UI 12.5 shell per­formed well on the Black Shark 4 Pro. Inter­est­ing fea­tures are built into the soft­ware and inter­face:

• Pro­jec­tion of the game proces­sor to the TV with a delay of only 40 ms;
• game screen pan­el (over­lay) with FPS counter, smart­phone con­trol but­tons, bat­tery charge indi­ca­tor and Net­work sig­nal strength indi­ca­tor.

JoyUI 12.5 was devel­oped based on Xiaomi’s MIUI 12: brand fans eas­i­ly fig­ured out the intri­ca­cies of cus­tomiza­tion. There is only one prob­lem — out of the box Black Shark 4 Pro runs on Android 11 OS. The man­u­fac­tur­er promis­es to release an update.

Black Shark 5 Pro with Android 12 and Joy UI 13 has the same set of gam­ing fea­tures with slight­ly bet­ter per­for­mance. The pre-installed Shark Space app is a gam­ing por­tal that links your smart­phone account with data from the Explore Feed (Playsta­tion) or Dash­board (Xbox). Brand­ed game over­lay appears when you swipe your fin­ger across the screen from any angle.

The over­lay helps you cap­ture per­for­mance and man­age your smart­phone. Pho­to: zdnet.com

Camera

Black Shark 4 Pro is not a cam­era phone. The device has three lens­es:

• main 64 MP, f/1.8;
• ultra wide-angle 8 MP, f/2.2;
• macro 5 MP.

Ultra wide angle and macro lens­es do not pro­vide enough detail and sat­u­ra­tion. The pic­tures are not bad, but their over­all qual­i­ty is aver­age. But the main cam­era shoots with high-qual­i­ty detail, good bokeh and sharp­ness.

In 99% of cas­es on the Black Shark 4 Pro, the main lens comes to the res­cue. Pho­to: ixbt.com

In the Black Shark 5 Pro mod­el, the fol­low­ing was built into the square mod­ule:

• main cam­era 108 MP;
• 13 MP ultra wide-angle lens;
• macro lens 5 MP.

The main cam­era with a Sam­sung S5KHM2 sen­sor takes 12 MP images by default. Their qual­i­ty is decent: real­is­tic col­or repro­duc­tion, high frame detail. In the 108 MP mode, sharp­ness suf­fers a lit­tle, but this does not affect the over­all per­cep­tion. From a gam­ing smart­phone for 70,000 rubles, it makes no sense to demand per­fect shots.

For gamers and casu­al users, the Black Shark 5 Pro’s main cam­era will suf­fice. Pho­to: www.gsmarena.com

Notice­able progress in the qual­i­ty of ultra-wide-angle shots. Excel­lent detail and good dynam­ic range add anoth­er shoot­ing option to Black Shark 5 Pro own­ers. The macro lens is not per­fect, but it has accu­rate aut­o­fo­cus — the pic­tures are clear and clean.

In video mode, both devices are avail­able in 4K for­mats (30 FPS / 60FPS). Ver­sion 5 Pro has a slight­ly bet­ter dynam­ic range, good col­or repro­duc­tion, no noise and oth­er arti­facts,

conclusions

Design is a mat­ter of taste. The tech­ni­cal com­par­i­son of the two smart­phones is in favor of the Black Shark 5 Pro. The device will launch any game with­out any obvi­ous weak­ness­es and take good pho­tos. The pow­er reserve for gam­ing tasks is at least one and a half to two years. Black Shark 5 Pro is opti­mal for con­nois­seurs of flag­ship solu­tions and pur­chas­es of the “take it and close the issue” for­mat for a long time. For the best Xiao­mi gam­ing smart­phone, you need to pay about 75,000 rubles (price at the time of writ­ing).

Black Shark 4 Pro costs almost 2 times cheap­er and is infe­ri­or to its old­er broth­er only in per­for­mance and cam­era. The Quar­tet still han­dles top games and any day-to-day tasks. Approx­i­mate­ly 80% of what gives Black Shark 5 Pro, the fourth ver­sion is with­in the pow­er. Black Shark Pro 4 will tech­ni­cal­ly become obso­lete faster than the new flag­ship, but there is no more bal­anced mod­el for eco­nom­i­cal gam­ing in 2022.