Xiaomi 14 Review: Leica cameras never cease to impress
After last year’s heralded launch of the Xiaomi 13 Series, Xiaomi is once again ready to stamp its mark with the Xiaomi 14 Series.
Xiaomi landed on a crucial ingredient to their success with the co-engineered Leica cameras. This, in my opinion, stomped out many of its competitors and edged Xiaomi closer towards the unmoved pinnacles of Apple and Samsung.
I would assume that in developing the Xiaomi 14, it was simply a case of ‘don’t fix what’s not broken.’
The Xiaomi 14 Series launched with two models: the Xiaomi 14 and Xiaomi 14 Ultra. It’s not often you get to say this, but regardless of the model you choose, powerful cameras are a guarantee.
Even with the base model, the Xiaomi 14 comes decked with a full range of Leica optics and filters that delivers. Especially if you’re a camera buff that buys into the unique ethos of the Leica brand – you’ll be proud to have this in your hand.
Our good fortunes aligned and saw to it that we would have a stint with the Xiaomi 14. So, here’s what we thought of Xiaomi’s flagship offering of 2024.
What comes in the box?
The Xiaomi 14 supports speedy 90W wired charging, helped by a 90W power adapter that’s thankfully included in the box. It’s a 2-pin adapter, though, so it’s best to make a habit of carrying a two-pin converter if you’re charging anywhere outside of home.
Also included is a USB-A to USB-C cable, and a silicone phone casing. Other than that, it’s the usual SIM ejector and user manuals.
Built and Design
Xiaomi is among a rare breed of brands still releasing palm-friendly flagships. It’s 6.36″ here on the Xiaomi 14, and its closest rivals in terms of ‘small phones’ are the iPhone 15 at 6.1″, and lately the Galaxy S24 at 6.2″.
You won’t find too many catering to the small phone market nowadays. Even the Nothing Phone (2) – seen by many as a potential contender to the Apple iPhones – is 6.7-inches, which makes it more a rival to the larger Plus and Pro Max models rather than the 6.1″ iPhone models. vivo hits 6.78″ on the X100 Series, with the OnePlus 12R equaling that and going bigger still with the OnePlus 12 at 6.82″. The same can be said of the HUAWEIs and the OPPOs, whose flagship offerings (as of 2023) start at 6.7″.
If you didn’t realize it then, you’ve realized it now. Appreciate the small phones while you can!
As for the built and design, the Xiaomi 14 dons a smooth matte-like texture on the rear panels. It is important to mention that the White and Jade Green models do come with glass back, which from my experience with glass back devices tend to attract unsightly fingerprints. It’s not the case with the Black coloured model though. In fact, I found this texture to be very fingerprint-resistant, and I far prefer this rendition of whatever material they’ve used here.
The curved back is maintained from its predecessors and offers lovely grip for single hand usage.
The side rails are furnished with reflective aluminum. You’ll find the power button and volume rockers along the right panel of the phone, while the bottom is where the USB-C port, speakers, and SIM card slot are located.
Given the size of the Xiaomi 14, the camera module stands out a lot. In terms of its width, the module itself eats up more than half of the phone. They definitely weren’t trying to hide or minimalize that large square-with-rounded-edge lens bump. But really, why would you when you can have that Leica branding emblazoned across the glass?
With that being said, by virtue of its prominent bump, there’s a very noticeable slant when the phone is laid flat down with the screen up.
Leica Cameras – Photography
We can sing endless praises about the cameras on the Xiaomi 14, and spoiler alert: there’s going to be a lot to talk about.
Let’s get the fundamentals out of the way first. The Xiaomi 14 comes with a tri-camera line-up consisting of the 50MP main camera with equivalent 23mm focal length. This is flanked with a 50MP ultra-wide with 14mm focal length, and a 50MP telephoto with 75mm focal length and up to 3.2x optical zoom. Of the three, only the main camera and telephoto have OIS.
Switching between lenses is quick and snappy, happening almost instantaneously from when you tap on the lens option at the bottom of the camera preview. For digital zoom, you can either use your two fingers to zoom in or out, or for single-hand use, simply tap on the lens option (0.6x, 1x, 2x, or 3.2x) twice to bring out the rotatable semi-circle where you can control the zoom length.
We were impressed with the quality churned out by all the lenses. The 50MP 23mm camera delivered accurate colours and clarity, whilst keeping shadows and brightness crisp. I did find that under the battering sun on a bright day, the cameras tend to initially overexpose the whites on the preview, making the photos seem washed out. But it’s nothing a little adjustment on the brightness slider can’t fix. In all other scenarios, it performed perfectly.
Even the 75mm telephoto at its 3.2x optical zoom was commendable, with hardly any loss in details that you probably can’t tell it apart from the 1x of the main camera.
For the record, the Xiaomi 14’s digital zoom maxes out at 60x, but we wouldn’t recommend going anywhere near there unless you’re ready to take a major drop in quality.
At the top right of the preview is where you can toggle between the two Leica styles: Leica Authentic and Leica Vibrant, which attempts to mimic the colour styles of actual Leica cameras. The Authentic option is more film-like, layered with a faded vintage quality and what seems to be a very light vignette around the edges; while the Vibrant brings out colours a little more. Truth be told, the differences are ever so subtle.
Notice the darkened edges and deeper hues compared to Leica Vibrant (photo below)
It’s not something you’d recognize in an instant unless you go looking for it. Nevertheless, we’re confident you’ll use it simply because it is so accessible and you’ll probably do a quick toggle between the two anyway just to see if one fits the aesthetic better.
If Xiaomi were to exclaim that the Xiaomi 14 Series is a portrait specialist, then hey, we wouldn’t stand in the way. They’ve pulled out all the stops here, and the Xiaomi 14 has easily one of the most versatile portrait settings you can get. The Master-lens System in Portrait mode presents a range of bokeh styles and pre-set focal lengths to choose from, consisting of:
- Standard
- Documentary (35mm)
- Swirly bokeh (50mm)
- Portrait (75mm)
- Soft focus (90mm)
From our time experimenting, the results are excellent. The bokeh is rendered perfectly with a very pleasing swirl that brings out the subject. Most importantly though, the edges of the subject and the background are separated accurately and don’t make the picture look artificial, which is the bane I find in many smartphone cameras.
We did realize that in the preview, the picture didn’t look all that great with an obvious outline surrounding the subject. But once you’ve tapped the shutter button, we suppose some computational wizardry takes shape and the photo comes out flawless.
Night photography was just as impressive on the main 23mm camera. Even under poor lighting conditions, the lens managed to keep the colours under control. Just observing the light bulbs in the photo below, you can see that the yellows are maintained, and the whites are not overblown to the extent it outshines the surrounding.
Furthermore, we must give due credit to the stabilization here, as even at a slow 1/25s shutter, there’s nil blurriness detected. Also, how about that near noiseless photo at ISO1250? We were pretty much in awe of how everything turned out to be.
Now the Xiaomi 14 is not without its flaws. It excels with flying colours when it comes to portraits and basically anything else that uses the main, ultra-wide, and telephoto lenses – which encompasses most photo-worthy scenarios in your day-to-day anyway.
This is no zoom camera though. Despite a Supermoon mode – which maxes out the 60x digital zoom and I assume some computational enhancements – we’ve seen better moon shots on the Samsung flagships. So, as far as astrophotography goes, you’ll probably find better options out there. Then again, Leica’s more well-known for being a street photography brand, so we’re pretty much okay with the ‘flaw.’
Overall, we’ll still stand by our opinion that this is among the best cameras you’ll find on a flagship.
Leica Camera – Video Recording
On the video recording side of things, the Xiaomi 14 shoots up to 8K at 30fps; it can reach the heights of 60fps, but only with 4K and 1080p recording.
Based on our brief time with the phone, we can say the Xiaomi 14 shoots great in 4K with clear audio to follow suit. Zooming in and out while recording was smooth with no staggering whatsoever.
It does have some neat features like Motion tracking focus, but is unfortunately not supported in 8K or any other resolution with 60fps. If you do want to utilize this, the best you can do is 4K at 30fps.
Alongside Video mode, you can also shoot in Movie mode, which has the option of a 2:39:1 aspect ratio popular in movies. In this mode you have Autofocus, as well as a Blur option to adjust bokeh intensity. It’s fun, but not something I personally would get too excited about.
You’ll find plenty of other frills in video mode, such as Source tracking, Super macro, and a Teleprompter. It’ll be a bit of a reach to say this is going to be a videographer’s best friend, but it’s still capable of some really cinematic footage especially once you familiarize yourself with the cameras.
Performance
If we were to sum up the performance of the Xiaomi 14 in a phrase, it would be ‘as expected on a flagship.’ The Xiaomi 14 is among the throng of new A-tier devices carrying the latest Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, this includes the Ultra variant too.
Along with a top-of-the-line processor is 12GB of LPDDR5X RAM and 512GB of UFS4.0 storage.
As mentioned earlier the Xiaomi 14 is 6.36-inches with an LTPO AMOLED display and 2670x1200p resolution. Since it is LTPO, refresh rates are adaptive. Xiaomi’s official website says that refresh rates drop all the way to 1Hz, but based on the built-in refresh rate counter enabled using Developer mode, the minimum seems to go only as low as 10Hz. Going up to 120Hz posed no issues, and we can assure scrolling and swiping is as smooth as it gets.
The high performance carries itself well even with some heavy-duty gaming. We enjoyed a lag-less experience with responsive touch rates even for graphically-intense games, namely Call of Duty, Mobile Legends, and Asphalt 9: Legends. On the audio side of things, you’ll have stereo speakers with Dolby Atmos support that gives off deep, rich tones with plenty of bass.
The Xiaomi 14 packs 4,610mAh battery which will give you a day’s worth of battery; alongside 90W wired charging and 50W wireless charging. Xiaomi has overpromised on the charging times here, claiming full charge in 31 minutes for its wired HyperCharge. To test it, we ran the batteries down to 0% and plugged it via the included charging brick and USB-C cable, keeping time stamps of the percentage throughout. Overall, we found the Xiaomi 14 took
- 10 minutes to reach 25%
- 25 minutes to reach 50%
- 40 minutes to reach 77%, and
- 53 minutes to reach 100%
Having a fully charged phone under the hour mark is still puts the Xiaomi 14 on the good side of the scale, but we wouldn’t advice that you bank too much on the 100%-in-31-minutes hype.
Xiaomi 14: The verdict
Overall, the Xiaomi 14 boasts outstanding camera performance in both the photo-taking and video recording department. The Leica collaboration has proven to be fruitful once more, and long may it prosper so long as they continue to make headway in the right direction.
Performance has been completely reliable and snappy. We encountered no lags and staggers when going through our day-to-day, which include mostly social media scrolling, web browsing, and video streaming. Even for gaming, the Xiaomi 14 proved capable of handling graphically demanding first-person-shooters (FPS) and Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) games.
At a starting price of only RM3499, the Xiaomi 14 presents itself as a realistic and cost-saving option for flagship-seekers. It’s not entirely an exaggeration to say there are phones beyond the RM4,000+ range that have less impressive cameras and lacking – if not equal – performance.
If not the Xiaomi 14, then the Xiaomi flagships of tomorrow may well be on the way to shake up the status quo. For now, this is a device I would certainly recommend to a friend with full confidence.
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