Xiaomi’s Android almost-flagship has a camera | Tech News

You would possibly moderately count on the best camera on a telephone to be one of the costliest, and also you’d actually be proper that the priciest handsets typically have great optics. The £1,099 iPhone 17 Pro, £1,249 Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra and £1,099 Oppo Find X8 Pro all have superlative snappers, however in addition they would possibly require you to take out a loan to get your fingers on them.

While not precisely a price range machine, the £649 Xiaomi 15T Pro I’ve been testing for the previous two weeks has totally impressed me with its succesful triple cameras that more than maintain their own towards the aforementioned flagships.

Xiaomi additionally has its own eye-wateringly costly £1,299 Xiaomi 15 Ultra that I mentioned had the best smartphone cameras I’d ever used back in April. But for precisely half that price, I like to recommend most price-conscious cell photographers think about the 15T Pro.

A fast notice on Xiaomi’s releases: although the Xiaomi 15 Ultra and £899 Xiaomi 15 got here out earlier this 12 months, the 15T and 15T Pro launched in September aren’t fairly sequels. Xiaomi’s T collection are a complement to the high-end fashions, launched six months afterwards with cheaper costs and completely different designs, with specs a rung beneath the model’s very best.

But the Xiaomi 15T Pro has a 5x optical telephoto lens, which is best than the zoom on the pricier Xiaomi 15 and, for my money, is best than the zoom capabilities of the trio of £799 telephones the iPhone 17 (which has no telephoto lens in any respect), the Samsung Galaxy S25 and the Google Pixel 10.

Part of that is down to Xiaomi’s ongoing partnership with camera model Leica. The camera app on the 15T Pro permits you to select unique Leica filters to use to your photographs, in addition to two overarching taking pictures modes of both ‘authentic’, which is film-like, or ‘vibrant’ which is more of a processed smartphone look.

With the best tweaking, outcomes may be superb certainly and to my eyes are a lot more stylistically and creatively attention-grabbing than what you will get out of the stock camera app from competing telephones at this price.

The primary lens is a 50MP sensor with an aperture of 1/1.62, optical image stabilisation (OIS) and 23mm equal focal size. You can faucet 1x within the camera app to cycle via 23mm, 28mm and 35mm crops all utilizing the lens although to get completely different lengths, and you may even set your most popular one as default.

The 5x telephoto lens can also be a 50MP sensor with f/3.0 and OIS and an equal 115mm focal size. This is definitely fairly zoomed in for portrait photographs of people as it’s important to stand fairly far back. Because of this, I discovered the 15T Pro higher for – and great at – road pictures. Whether it was people or structure or in any other case, I took some pictures when exploring Munich that I used to be more than happy with.

The beneath gallery has pictures I captured utilizing the telephone’s primary and telephoto lenses.

The telephoto lens is the primary cause to decide on this telephone. The readability of pictures mixed with the processing and flexibility on offer with the {hardware} and filter software program is outstanding. It’s a significantly better zoom lens than the comparatively pitiful 10MP 3x optical on the Galaxy S25, and it’s of higher high quality than the ten.8MP 5x on the Pixel 10.

For a price that undercuts these telephones, the Xiaomi 15T Pro additionally affords a Pro mode together with the power to shoot in RAW file format for more versatile enhancing in your pc afterwards – one thing Apple restricts to its £1,099+ iPhone 17 Pro fashions.

The 12MP ultra-wide camera is much less spectacular and more perfunctory, however one thing’s gotta give. Plus the 32MP selfie camera makes up for it with sharp, clear pictures for photographs or video calls.

Xiaomi nonetheless insists on a busy software program pores and skin with its HyperOS model of Android, nevertheless it’s much less invasive than in years passed by. I fortunately tailored to utilizing the telephone, and to my nice shock discovered HyperOS more minimal and out of my face after some tweaking than Samsung’s newest iteration of One UI.

If you plump for the 15T Pro, you’ll get 5 years of Android OS updates and 6 of security patches, so that you’ll nonetheless be kicking in 2031. That’s a 12 months behind Samsung and Google’s industry best, however the actuality is no telephone will actually final seven years with out some severe care and a battery alternative. It’s good to see Xiaomi nearly keep tempo right here.

The design of the 15T Pro is improved over final 12 months’s starkly utilitarian 14T Pro, nevertheless it’s nonetheless a little pedestrian. I just like the gray color of my review pattern, although there are black and mocha gold variations for those who desire. It’s a very huge telephone, which for my smaller fingers made for a machine not possible to make use of with one paw.

Battery life is great at about a day and a half of common use, however there’s no charger within the box – irritating when the telephone would charge at zippy 90W speeds if I had one. That’s quicker than any telephone bought by Apple, Samsung or Google. Other corners cut embody the nice however not fairly top-of-the-line MediaTek Dimensity 9400+, although I discovered efficiency faultless, and the 144Hz OLED screen, whereas wonderful, shouldn’t be LTPO tech, so can’t tune down to 1Hz for the best vitality effectivity, which might improve battery life.

But these are nitpicks.

If I had £800 to spend on a telephone I’d critically think about the £649 Xiaomi 15T Pro above pricier and more well-known rival handsets. It’s a little non-descript in look and a bit huge besides, however affords an unbeatable pictures bundle at this degree. In a 12 months when the photographs from Samsung Galaxy and Google Pixel gadgets have misplaced character and film-like glow, Xiaomi is stepping up.

The Xiaomi 15T Pro is offered to buy now from Xiaomi