Xiaomi Mi 3 review: The way of the dragon

13 MP camera does a great job

Xiaomi Mi 3 features a 13MP camera coupled with a dual LED flash to help you with the low-light scenes.

The interface is fairly standard - everything is placed at the two side bars. On the left you get front camera shortcut, camera/camcorder switch and flash settings. The right sidebar has the settings toggle, the camera shutter and the gallery shortcut.

Camera UI

The settings offer HDR, scenes, focus mode, white balance, exposure and ISO manual settings, among others. The Face Detection and Image stabilization switches are within the additional settings (the small gear key).

Xiaomi Mi 3's camera resolves plenty of detail. The colors are somewhat oversaturated and the white balance sometimes is off, but overall, the Mi 3 image quality is great.

Xiaomi Mi 3 camera samples

The HDR mode is conservative and rescues both the highlights and shadows without making the contrast too low.

HDR off • HDR on • HDR off • HDR on

Panorama shots are available too - you can capture both landscape and portrait panoramic photos at about 180 degree. Shooting is easy but the stitching takes more than a minute to complete. The end result isn't as impressive as we've expected - the portrait shots come in 3400x1200px pixels while the landscape mode results in 4000x700px.

While the panoramic images are stitched very well, the quality and resolution are below the competition. The exposure is way off, too.

Panorama samples

Xiaomi Mi 3 features a 2MP front-facing camera for shooting 16:9 selfies. The images lack proper sharpness and are somewhat less saturated than we would like them to be. On the positive side, there is no visible geometrical distortion and closeups of faces turn out looking just fine.

An intriguing feature is the skin enhancement effect, which tries to guess guess your age and sex while you are framing the shot and it reports them right in the viewfinder. We guess it's even supposed to adjust the enhancement accordingly, but for us, it ruined every single shot with the skin coming out way too unnatural.

A 2MP picture taken with the front camera

Photo comparison tool

The Xiaomi Mi 3 is more than capable of carrying its own weight in our Photo Comparison tool. You can see it does pretty well against the other 13 MP snappers.

Xiaomi Mi 3 in our photo compare tool

Video recording

Xiaomi Mi 3's camcorder shares the same UI as the still camera. It supports slow-motion videos and time-lapse videos with customizable snapping interval.

Camcorder UI

Image stabilization is available too and it manages to keep the video steadier, but as usual it will lower your field of view significantly.

You can also capture 10MP images during video recording. Here are two samples of such snapped pictures:

Pictures taken while recording a video

The Xiaomi Mi 3 is capable or recording 1080p@30fps videos. The clips have a bitrate of around 15 Mbps, audio is captured at 96 Kbps with a sampling rate of 48 kHz with 2 channels (read stereo).

The detail levels in the videos are high, while colors are pretty good and the framerate very consistent at 29fps. Contrast and white balance are great too for some impressive footage overall.

Here is a 1080p video we've uploaded on YouTube.

And here's an untouched 1080p @ 30fps video sample taken straight off the Xiaomi Mi 3.

Video quality comparison tool

The Xiaomi Mi 3 enters our video comparison too. There are plenty of 1080p camcorders you can compare it to, but it has proven to be among the best with great detail, colors, and contrast.

Xiaomi Mi 3 in our video compare tool