Xiaomi 13 Pro review: It packs in flagship-level hardware. Still, will that be enough for it to make its presence felt as a «photographer’s phone» in a market where users already have the likes of the iPhone, the Galaxy S series, and the Pixel series?
“Please don’t say I’m arrogant because what I say is true. I am the European champion, so…I think I’m a special one.”
Legendary football manager Jose Mourinho made “the Special One” a special term when he gave a press conference in 2004. He gave the term a meaning that went well beyond the words in it. The Special One henceforth was not just written in capitals but also referred to someone or something that was more than just special – it was used to refer to something that not everyone would like but whose quality could not be denied, even by its critics.
The Xiaomi 13 Pro is the Special One of phone cameras. It is that simple. Not everyone is going to like it. But finding actual fault with it is a difficult task.
Table of ContentsXiaomi 13 Pro Cameras: There’s a lot of Leica in the specs
The Xiaomi 13 Pro has been broadly positioned as a phone designed for photographers. That is a very bold claim in an era when phones are being identified more with photography than “regular” cameras. There are many phone cameras right now that would give your regular point-and-shoot camera a good run for its money in terms of image quality. The iPhone is incredibly consistent with realistic colors and the Lord of videos, and the Pixel series uses computational photography to add details that most cameras miss. Samsung’s Galaxy S series has made high-quality 10x zoom a thing, even on phones. So what is so special about the Xiaomi 13 Pro?
Some would say the tag of Leica, a legendary name in photography and the favorite camera brand of many photographers, makes the Xiaomi 13 Pro special. It is certainly a huge name to be associated with. But then we have seen Leica on phones before (from Huawei from 2016-2022), and big phone brands are not always synonymous with great photography, as Motorola’s experience with Hasselblad taught us. Just having a label or a few filters is not enough – the phone has got to feel as if it has a strong element of the camera brand associated with it.
What makes the Xiaomi 13 Pro special is the sheer level of Leica involvement. All three cameras on the back of the phone come with Leica’s “professional optical lenses.” But that’s not all – there are two photographic Leica styles with different color signatures, four special portrait modes inspired by Leica, four Leica-specific filters for taking and editing pictures, and six Leica photo frames.
There is some serious camera hardware on board as well. The Xiaomi 13 Pro is the first smartphone in India to come with a one-inch sensor, the Sony IMX 989, with Xiaomi’s Hyper OIS for greater stability. The phone is also the first to come with a “floating” telephoto lens with OIS that has 3.2x optical zoom and 70x digital zoom, but thanks to a “focal shift” feature, it has a focus range of 10 cm to infinity. Rounding off the Leica troika at the back is an ultrawide sensor with a 115-degree field of view. All three camera sensors on the back are 50 megapixels each, shades of the Xiaomi 12 Pro. The selfie camera in front is a 32-megapixel one but has no Leica flavoring.
In short, you are getting a lot of Leica for your money, and unlike in other devices, this time, it comes parked on top of perhaps the best camera hardware in the smartphone market. Xiaomi 13 Pro Camera Performance: There’s a lot of Leica here as well
All that hardware and software come together to deliver some outstanding photography from the three cameras on the back, especially if you are a Leica fan. You get two photographic styles – Leica Authentic, which focuses on realistic colors, and Leica Vivid, which slightly boosts saturation levels. The difference between them is subtle – Vivid will brighten up some colors but is not going to give you the kind of hyper-saturated shots that you get from many Android flagships. We went with Leica Authentic for most of our snaps. And just like in Leica cameras, we found that the color signature by default favored darker shades a little, making them somehow appear a little richer – something which really leaped out at us in black and white shots taken with the camera. The Xiaomi 13 Pro is also impressively quick in shooting as well as processing snaps – a task at which some flagships can lag sometimes.
The one-inch sensor delivers very good photographs, with plenty of detail and typical pleasant-but-still-realistic Leica colors.
