Xiaomi 15 Ultra review
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- Anonymous
- xjH
- 03 Mar 2025
AnonD-814624, 03 Mar 2025I tried it indoors and the quality at 200mm was significant... moreThe HP9 is only good for 2x zoom, not 4x.
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- AnonD-814624
- PyL
- 03 Mar 2025
Anonymous, 02 Mar 2025Gsmarena, you forgot to take 17.2x (8.6*2=17.2) zoom photos... moreI tried it indoors and the quality at 200mm was significantly better than the quality at 400mm. The drop in quality was significant. Maybe it would hold up better outdoors though
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- Nick Tegrataker
- Xpg
- 03 Mar 2025
- Excellent battery life surpassing a lot of other phones with a larger battery capacity, which is good to see from Xiaomi given that they have been falling behind BBK and Samsung in this regard for many years now.
- It's disappointing that their flagship phone, once again, instead of throttling down the chip to keep it cool, pushes it to the point where it overheats and decides to shut down the benchmark app entirely instead. While I haven't observed a real-life report of recent Xiaomi phones shutting down apps (including games), forcing this kind of behaviour on the OS to make their product look better on review definitely hurts their brand image as a whole. Xiaomi absolutely needs to stop doing this - end of story.
- Compared to its predecessor, I see a substantial upswing in its overall image quality. The details look a lot finer than in the 14 Ultra in all its 4 cameras especially during the day, highlight control is now a tad better in low light, and the larger sensor + lens combo on the telephoto lens is absolutely proving its worth. It easily matches the X100 Ultra in this regard, and that's a great thing.
- The lack of the variable aperture in its main camera this year should have been emphasised 100x more in this review, however. This was what let Xiaomi 14 Ultra stand out so much from the rest: the ability to control depth of field (Crucial for a camera with a type 1 sensor), use slower shutter speed for panning shots, and create nice sunstars for creative effects. Well, they are all gone this year. The UWA camera now became a lot narrower to accommodate a smaller sensor, too. In terms of hardware specs, this is more of a sidegrade, and as a whole I don't really consider this camera setup to be any more attractive than the one on the 14 Ultra.
- I haven't got the exact number for its native field of view (Around 93-95mm equivalent in FF?), but the telephoto lens is definitely cropping in when shooting in binned mode as I can easily see the difference in wideness between the 12.5MP shots and 50MP shots. One thing I can say for sure is that stating this as a "100mm" lens on the spec sheet as well as on the actual camera bump is very deceptive, and I'm in utter disappointment to see Xiaomi going down this path.
- Is there any reason why additional shooting modes (Leica Authentic and other various Leica-branded filters) are not mentioned in this review?
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- Anonymous
- qb{
- 03 Mar 2025
indlvarn, 03 Mar 2025Great phone, but curved screen and 5410mah battery is a no ... morehow is a 5410 mah battery that bad for you?
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- indlvarn
- 0@{
- 03 Mar 2025
Great phone, but curved screen and 5410mah battery is a no for me.
I was interested in Oppo Find X8 Ultra, but sadly it won't be available in global version.
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- HiddenEmpire
- MeP
- 03 Mar 2025
Google dialer and messages app make the home screen ugly for this type of gorgeous display. Good to see if it has an inbuilt dialer and message app.?
- PureOS
- Mx}
- 02 Mar 2025
Anonymous, 02 Mar 2025I use hyperOS. For some reason, when I use 90Hz (Poco M5), ... moreHigher refresh rate will always consume more power.
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- Paul
- qcx
- 02 Mar 2025
This phone has impressive telephoto sensors at 3x and 4.3x but not do good sensors in ultrawide and selfie cameras. Very unclear why.
But in smartphones, the computational processing is also very important, where xoaomi is not so strong. Thus over several years xiaomi photos and videos are not regarded as good as those from other phones, based on professionals.
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- Anonymous
- JHk
- 02 Mar 2025
Gsmarena, you forgot to take 17.2x (8.6*2=17.2) zoom photos. Xiaomi advertised the 400mm performance and at 8.6x there might be 4-1 analog binning, so one doesn't see the best performance. A 200 megapixel sensor theoretically gives you 4 times as much reach, not twice as much reach. You have uploaded 200 megapixel sample images, but at 17.2x Xiaomi possibly could combine more frames or use better algorithms because the processing time for a 200 megapixel image could be a bit too long.
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- Namelesss
- Ed1
- 02 Mar 2025
Good! Now just waiting to see how the Vivo x200 ultra and Oppo find X8 Ultra will compare to this one
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- Anonymous
- JHk
- 02 Mar 2025
Here's a 30x comparison between the Xiaomi 14 Ultra and the Pixel 8 Pro: i.computer-bild.de/imgs/1/5/2/4/1/5/4/9/30-fach-Tele-Google-Pixel-8-Pro--Honor-Magic6-Pro--Xiaomi-14-Ultra--Samsung-836-2048x1152-accf4b4c7e27f785.jpg
Why do I post that? I want to show that it isn't enough to perform just a little bit better than the Xiaomi 14 Ultra because the Pixel 8 Pro (which has nearly exactly the same 10x tele performance as the 7 Pro) outperformed it and the Xiaomi 14 Ultra even produced fake details (note that the Pixel 8 Pro and 7 Pro often even outperform the Pixel 9 Pro because the 9 Pro uses analog binning in good light conditions).
But from what I have seen so far, it is possible that the Xiaomi 15 Ultra's tele performance is even inferior to the Xiaomi 14 Ultra regarding the effective resolution.
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- Anonymous
- xjH
- 02 Mar 2025
kdss, 02 Mar 2025The more flagships come out on the market, the more I enjoy... moreHow does 2x zoom look on the OnePlus 13? In the review here, they said it's bad. But I've seen that you're a user of the phone (saw you a lot in the comments), so, how does it perform? Is the main camera's 1x and 2x good?
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- Anonymous
- 0p}
- 02 Mar 2025
jiyen235, 02 Mar 2025The rx-100's sensor is just better bro. Dedicated came... moreOnly 2 advantages of sensor used by rx100 mk7 are: bayer CFA and the DRAM for faster readout (same tech of XZ Premium).
It is an old sensor that got modified for Pro-i. How many years already?
Plastic lenses + jpeg enhancements to " look Instragramable" is what are holding phones behind.
I had sony w830. 1/2.3" semsor.
Only issue was noise , dim aperture compared to phones.
No oil painting, no wax , no sharpening.
I had Motorola with simple JN1 .. DNG turned into jpeg without any touching looks far better than jpeg of Edge 50 Ultra.
OV50a is garbage. Own experience here.
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- kdss
- nTd
- 02 Mar 2025
The more flagships come out on the market, the more I enjoy my choice 1+ 13 - more phone for less money.
Right now I can't justify these 200-500 dollars/euro more for each of the more expensive than 1+ 13 phones on the market. By adding a gift 1+ 2R watch and wireless headphones + 3 years warranty, instead of 2 and 100 euros discount from the final price - I have literally made the deal of the year.
- jiyen235
- XQQ
- 02 Mar 2025
PureOS, 02 Mar 2025Hyper os is disaster for battery life, not boost as u said.... moremy bad bro, im misremembering things then.
- jiyen235
- XQQ
- 02 Mar 2025
Anonymous, 02 Mar 2025I understand where you're coming from, Jiyen. But just... morewhatever the case man, this sucks and i hate it. Really sad considering the fact that I respect Xiaomi for their photography capabilities a lot.
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- Anonymous
- 0p}
- 02 Mar 2025
Wasn't international mi 15 also there?
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- Anonymous
- JHk
- 02 Mar 2025
The 200 megapixel sample images look disappointing. They are supposed to give you a decent image quality when you use them for 95*4=380mm crops, but I have created 240mm crops and downsampled them to 12.5 megapixel and even then I would say that the image quality is not very good at pixel level.
Recently, I have also seen a comparison between the Xiaomi 15 Ultra and Xiaomi 14 Ultra and the Xiaomi 14 Ultra's periscope occasionally had more detail.
So the Xiaomi 15 Ultra doesn't seem to leverage what is possible regarding diffraction, Xiaomi seems to have issues with the Tetra²pixel array (and possibly also with the 2x2 OCL array). The performance of the Honor Magic7 RSR 's periscope is disappointing, too.
But I have to stress that due to machine learning and fake details, a good comparison is only possible with a reference that doesn't use machine learning (for example Panasonic Tz99, Nikon P1100, ...).
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- Anonymous
- xjH
- 02 Mar 2025
PureOS, 02 Mar 2025Hyper os is disaster for battery life, not boost as u said.... moreI use hyperOS. For some reason, when I use 90Hz (Poco M5), my battery becomes very weak. On 60Hz, it becomes better.
Oh well. Some things are beyond comprehension!
- PureOS
- Mx}
- 02 Mar 2025
jiyen235, 02 Mar 2025power hungry SOC only at the most demanding instances. Othe... moreHyper os is disaster for battery life, not boost as u said. Ask other Xiaomi users, everyone will tell u that. And I had the same experience also.