Poco X6 Neo hands-on review

Camera

The Poco X6 Neo has a dual camera system on paper. You get a single 108MP f1.8 main camera and a 2MP depth sensor. This means, realistically, you just have a single camera to contend with. The phone does, however, have a trick up its sleeve, which is 3x lossless digital zoom but more on that later.

The camera app on the X6 Neo is somewhat basic. It has all the commonly used features, including a Pro mode, but lacks the option to capture RAW images. The Pro mode does feature some other niceties, however, such as a histogram, focus peaking, and zebra pattern for exposure metering.

Camera app

But let's move on to image quality. The rear 108MP camera can capture some good-looking images at 1x mode, provided the HDR option kicks in. Color reproduction and white balance are good and there is a reasonable amount of detail without too much sharpening. Unfortunately, the Auto HDR option is finicky and may not always kick in when necessary (and there's no way to force it on), so some images can have blown highlights.

12MP main camera

You can also choose to capture images in the native 108MP mode. We were pleased to see that these weren't just the 12MP images being blown up to 108MP but rather native captures from the sensor. Unfortunately, the phone turns off a lot of its image processing, including HDR, for this mode, so unless the lighting is perfect, expect to see a lot of blown highlights and washed-out colors.

108MP main camera

The X6 Neo does not have telephoto cameras, but it does have 3x lossless digital zoom. In this mode, the camera takes a crop of the middle of the native 108MP image, which results in fairly detailed and good-looking images. The results were quite surprising, as you'd be forgiven for thinking they came from a native 3x telephoto camera.

3x digital main camera

The thing with this camera is that this quality is only possible at the 3x option. The 2x mode (or rather anything between 1x to 3x) simply takes a crop from the 1x image, which can leave the 2x image looking significantly worse than both the 1x and 3x images. Similarly, anything beyond 3x is also a crop of the 3x image so they don't look great either, although we have to say they still look better than 2x, which can be noticeably bad quite a lot of the time.

2x digital main camera

Image processing can also vary between these modes. The 2x image (or anything below 3x) just inherits the processing of the 1x image while 3x and above have similar processing (or lack thereof) of the native 108MP image. This can cause back-to-back captures from 1x, 2x, and 3x to look significantly different at times.

We feel there is room for further camera optimization here to make the 3x images look a bit better in terms of colors and dynamic range. Similarly, the 2x images can benefit from reduced post-processing as they can look quite overdone at times. Still, for a phone with no actual telephoto camera, we were quite impressed with the 3x lossless capture on the X6 Neo.

When it comes to video, you are limited to a maximum of 1080p at 30fps. There is digital image stabilization but you don't get the clever zoom tricks here as the video is essentially a crop from the middle of the sensor.

The quality of the video is mediocre. While the image is fine in terms of color and dynamic range, it is noticeably soft and lacking in detail. The image stabilization works well enough, however, so if you just need something for TikTok or Instagram reels then it's not unusable.

Conclusion

The Poco X6 Neo is a really well-designed and well-built device with a high-quality display. The design alone makes us want to recommend it because of how nice it feels in the hand in a way that makes it far better than several more expensive smartphones. The performance, for the most part, is also good, as is the general camera quality.

The only downside would be the software experience, more specifically the intrusive nature of the ads, notifications, and bloatware. The single loudspeaker is also unbecoming even at this price point, and certain parts of the software could use more optimization to improve performance. We are also not fond of the device detecting benchmarks and artificially inflating its scores.

Still, for the price, the X6 Neo is really good value and something we are happy to recommend.