Xiaomi 14 Civi hands-on review

Camera

The Xiaomi 14 Civi has a Leica-branded triple camera system on the back consisting of a main 50MP f1.63 camera, which uses an OmniVision Light Hunter 800 (OVX8000) sensor, a 50MP f1.98 2x optical camera, which uses Samsung ISOCELL JN1 sensor, and a 12MP f2.2 ultra-wide camera, which uses an OmniVision OV13B sensor. On the front are two identical 32MP sensors, one of which has a wide lens with f2.0 aperture and auto-focus. The other has an ultra-wide lens with f2.4 aperture and fixed focus.

The camera app on the Xiaomi 14 Civi is fairly elaborate and almost on par with the flagship devices. You get all the camera modes, including the Movie mode with a fixed 21:9 aspect ratio. Being a Leica-branded device, you also get the Leica Vibrant and Authentic modes, along with a ton of Leica color filters. You can also add Leica-branded watermarks through the camera app or after the fact through the Gallery app. The images are captured in Display P3 color space and use the Pro HDR display feature to show a wider dynamic range in the Gallery app, but this was bugged on our unit and occasionally would stop working.

Xiaomi Camera app

Jumping straight into the image quality, we were really impressed by the performance of the main camera. The image has excellent detail without aggressive sharpening or ringing artifacts. Most of our images were shot in the Leica Vibrant profile, which can be considered the default despite its name. In this mode, the colors are a bit saturated but largely accurate.

Main 50MP samples

You'd expect the Leica Authentic mode to have more accurate colors, but that's not always the case. When enabled, the camera takes a second to assess the scene and can often churn out more saturated colors than the Vibrant setting depending on what's in the frame. Moreover, there is also an aggressive vignette applied to every shot, which is very situational and doesn't look great for every picture. As such, this mode was best left for more artistic shots and not for general photography.

Main 50MP samples: Leica Vibrant • Leica Authentic

In terms of dynamic range, the images weren't as impressive. While highlights are captured correctly, the camera tends to crush shadow detail to achieve its high-contrast look, which is consistent across all cameras on the phone regardless of the camera mode you're in. This can make certain images look a bit dark with obfuscated shadow detail.

The camera app lets you adjust the metering for either the frame average or any faces that may be in the frame. This can cause the image to be overexposed if the camera detects darker skin tones in the shot.

Main 50MP samples

Moving on, the 50MP telephoto camera also impressed us with its detail and overall image quality. There is also a toggle for a 4x zoom, which produces respectable results but anything beyond 5x doesn't look good outside the phone's display.

2x Telephoto 50MP samples

Finally, the ultra-wide camera also produced some good-looking images despite the relatively low 12MP resolution.

Ultra-wide 12MP samples

As for the front cameras, both produce good if slightly oversharpened results. However, for some reason, both cameras insist on saving images in the full 32MP resolution, which really isn't the native resolution of this sensor that's designed for binned 8MP output. The result is images that are captured internally at 8MP and then upscaled to 32MP, which doesn't look great when viewed at 100% scaling. Even if they were native 32MP images, one would argue no one needs that level of resolution to capture their faces.

32MP selfie • 32MP ultra-wide selfie

Overall, when it comes to still images, the Xiaomi 14 Civi proved to be a fun camera to shoot with. The saturated colors and contrasty image prioritize a stylized image and a more artistic style of photography that encourages you to be more creative. There isn't even an option to turn any of that down unless you shoot purely in RAW. How you feel about that depends upon what kind of photos you like to take but we believe most people are likely to enjoy the photos that come out of this phone.

Finally, when it comes to video, the Xiaomi 14 Civi captures good-looking 4K video from its main camera with great detail and image stabilization. The colors and dynamic range are similar to the still images, which are saturated and contrasty.

The main issue with the video from the main camera is that the autofocus is jittery, which can be noticed in the clip above but is especially noticeable in the clip below which is an upclose scene.

The 4K video from the telephoto camera is also quite good and didn't have the autofocus issues of the main camera.

Lastly, the ultra-wide also produced some decent-looking 4K clips although the issue here was noise, which was visible in the shadow regions and doesn't go away even when shooting in bright lighting.