Xiaomi Mi 10 Pro 5G review

Video recording

The Xiaomi Mi 10 Pro has a ton of video recording options. One of the key video features is the option to capture 8K videos at 30fps, but all other popular modes area available 4K at 30 and 60fps, as well as 1080 at 30 and 60 fps.

It seems at first that you can capture in these resolutions with all four cameras as all toggles are available - macro, ultrawide, 1x, 2x, and 5x, but you actually can't. And even then, you can't use any other zoom levels in-between those specified on the toggles.

The main camera does 8K, the main and ultrawide snappers can do up to 4K at 60fps, while the 2x tele snapper can't shoot in 60fps. Finally, the 5x option is digital zoom over the footage coming from the 2x tele.

The macro samples are shot with the ultrawide shooter, and thus all resolutions are available.

4-axis optical stabilization is available on the main camera, while (optional) electronic stabilization is available on all snappers in all 30fps modes. The only place you can't use it is when shooting macro videos.

Then there's the Super steady Mode shot with the main camera - it focuses more on stabilization rather than quality, as an action-camera would do.

Slow-mo videos are available on the main and ultrawide (as macro slow-mo) at 1080p and 720p @960fps.

Xiaomi has also incorporated 8 color filters for videos, including a B&W one (called Rome).

And now it's time to go through some videos samples.

Before we dig into the video side of things, the audio in all of the videos is captured at 320Kbps, stereo of course.

Main camera (108MP)

The 8K option is probably quite attractive. The videos offer a steady 30fps frame rate and are shot at 100+Mbps bitrate - meaning you are looking at 700MB for every minute of footage. That's a lot, but it would have been a worthy price if the video quality was great. It is not, though.

What we are looking at in these 8K clips is the center 7680x4320px portion of the sensor - with 4px squares of each primary color. They are big enough and far enough apart not to be able to provide intricate detail like what you could potentially get out of a regular Bayer array with a 1px pitch. And looking at a 100% crop from the 8K video, it is just like an upscaled image from 4K to 8K, which is more or less the case. But hey, 8K in a phone, yay!

The 4K videos from the main camera have excellent contrast, spot-on colors, and we can praise the dynamic range. The resolved detail is very good, though occasionally you get softness or smudginess in patterns like grass and foliage.

The 1080p footage is with excellent detail and contrast, also great dynamic range and accurate colors.

The 60fps clips exhibit a bit wider field of view as the default electronic stabilization is not active. They are also a bit warmer than the 30fps, but unless you are comparing them side by side, you will not notice this.

Interestingly, the resolved detail is almost the same in the 30fps and the 60fps clips despite these having quite similar video bit rates - 47Mbps vs. 50Mbps in 4K and 19Mbps vs. 20Mbps in 1080p resolution.

Ultrawide camera (20MP)

As far as ultrawide videos go, the Xiaomi Mi 10 Pro does an excellent job. The 4K and 1080p videos, both at 30 and 60fps, are nicely detailed, with very good color presentation and contrast. The dynamic range of the 30fps clips is superb, but there is a noticeable drop in the dynamic of the 60fps videos.

The 4K clips in both 30 and 60 fps are captured with 50Mbps bitrate, while in 1080p the bit rates are 15Mbps for the 30fps and 20Mbps for the 60fps.

Another peculiarity we noticed is that the 60fps clips, which does not offer electronic stabilization, still have a narrower field of view.

Telephoto camera 2X (12MP)

The 4K videos from the 2x tele snapper present excellent dynamic range, the perfect contrast, and accurate colors. They could benefit from some more sharpness, but even as it is - we like what we see.

The 1080p clips inherit all goodies we saw in the 4K footage, but also show off with sharp and detail picture.

The phone cannot use the dedicated 8MP long-range zoom camera for videos, and the 5x option makes digital zoom based off the feed from the 2x camera. Those are usable videos, yes, but nothing special.

As we mentioned - optical stabilization is always available on the main camera. The electronic stabilization on 30fps modes is enabled by default, and at the expense of a minor loss of FoV you will get nicely stabilized footage.

Here's a glimpse of how the Mi 10 Pro compares to rivals in our Video compare tool.

2160p: Mi 10 Pro Pro against the Galaxy S20 Ultra and the Huawei P40 Pro in our Video compare tool