Hey Tech Advisor fans, Adam here with the Mi 11i, one of a handful of Mi 11 versions
out from Xiaomi. While it sports some very impressive hardware features all around, I
wanted to specifically test out the camera. So in this video I’m going to show off the
results from a recent trip to one of my favorite nurseries in the bay area. Let’s dig into
the photos!
It’s been a while since I’ve had my hands on a Xiaomi phone so I was excited to try
out this new release as their camera tech has been progressing rapidly. Looking at the
specs, the Mi 11i packs a very large 108MP main sensor inside it’s triple camera array
- which is where I focused my efforts on. And while there are plenty of fun features
to try inside the stock camera app I stuck with the main mode for this quick test. I
left the app in it’s default configuration which has HDR set to auto, AI mode off, resulting
in a pixel-binned 12MP photo.
With all that in mind, let’s look at some plants! It was around noon when I visited
the nursery and the first thing I noticed after loading the photos into Lightroom was
how dark each photo appeared. And by dark I don’t mean how bright it was out - it
was full daylight - I mean that this camera system underexposed each photo I took under
harsh light. Looking at a histogram I noticed just how far to the left the tone is, meaning
the photo turned out darker than I would have preferred. It’s interesting because there
is plenty of room to drop the shutter speed and get a brighter exposure without blowing
out the highlights.
Out of all the photos I took there was only one example I could find of blown out highlights,
and that was inside where HDR did not seem fire. This is a tricky shot, and most cameras
would handle it this way, but it’s outside that had me scratching my head. It’s like
the camera wanted to protect highlights like they were an endangered species resulting
in some darker captures than I expected. While the exposure can be adjusted by editing, because
the exposure was off I wasn’t able to recover some of the darkest parts of these photos.
Luckily this is something that can be corrected with a patch, but it’s a weird trait to
look out for now if you happen to have this phone. It doesn’t completely ruin all the
photos I took, it just doesn't accurately represent how bright it was out that day and
I prefer a camera system that aims for accuracy.
Moving on from exposure, let's check out how well the colors turned out in these shots.
Here I am happy to report that almost all of these photos produced great results! I’ve
seen other phones really struggle around so much green, but the Mi 11i handled itself
like a champ. Not only is there plenty of variation between the greens that are represented,
they turned out just as I remembered them. This is probably helped by the slightly warmer
white balance as it tends to favor greener tones while impacting redder ones. Looking
at a couple red flowers shows just that: the reds are very saturated and almost represented
as neon because they are so vibrant. This can be corrected by editing so luckily it’s
not a huge deal, but knowing the limitations of each camera system is important to taking
great photos.
Now let’s talk about the sharpness of these photos - here we are going to be zooming in
to check out how well they hold up. While the sensor is 108MP, it uses pixel-binning
in the default mode to capture a 12MP result. When zooming in real close on some of these
photos we see that there is plenty of detail thanks to a combination of this large sensor
and the bright environments. Even fine hairs on a cactus is represented with detail and
it holds up to scrutiny. I also didn’t observe any telltale signs of post-processed oversharpening
or lens flaws. These things can show up as ghosting around high contrast edges or even
purple fringing in extreme cases. And while even some of the best cameras exhibit these
flaws around the edges of the frame where a lens is more susceptible to problems, I
am very surprised by how well the Mi 11i’s main shooter holds up edge to edge. There
is a bit of softening towards the corners, but that’s it. I did have one photo miss
focus here on this flower, and I’m not sure why, but by and large these are some clean
and sharp results in bright daylight - color me impressed. How well that holds up in low
light is another story - and one I didn’t test. You see, this main lens doesn’t have
an optical image stabilization system which could potentially hurt it under worse conditions,
but it wasn’t a problem here.
So while this was a pretty limited testing scenario, I’m generally happy with how the
Mi 11i performed under these conditions. Even though the exposure decisions weren’t fantastic
with bright, harsh light, I think it’s something that can be addressed via a software update.
And most of the time the photos that I snapped had plenty of dynamic range, reproduced pleasing
colors, and didn’t exhibit any major problems. Xiaomi has definitely made some major improvements
in the camera department since I last used one of their phones and I’m excited to see
how well their flagship devices perform against other companies. That’s right, after taking
some time off my smartphone camera testing series Last Cam Standing will be returning
this fall and I’m as ready to get back to it as I’m sure all of you are. So that means
you better subscribe and stay tuned for more camera comparisons in the future, here on
Tech Advisor!