Xiaomi Mi Note 10 review

Video camera

The Xiaomi Mi Note 10 captures videos up to 4K @ 30fps, and all other common modes are available - 1080@30fps and 1080p@60fps. It seems at first that you can capture in these resolutions with all five cameras as all toggles are available - macro, ultrawide, 1x, 2x, and 5x, but you actually can't. And you can't use other zoom levels besides those specified on the toggles.

The main and ultrawide cameras can do all of these, the 2x tele snapper can't shoot in 1080p @60fps, and 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.

There is 4-axis optical stabilization is available on the main camera, while electronic stabilization is available on all snappers in all 30fps modes. The only place you can't use it is when shooting macro videos, which is probably the place you will need it the most.

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

The video bit rate is 40-42Mbps in 4K. Audio is recorded in stereo with a 96Kbps bit rate.

The 4K videos from the main and ultrawide snappers have excellent contrast, spot-on colors, and we can praise the dynamic range. The resolved detail is far from impressive and the footage is rather soft - we have definitely seen better on other Xiaomi smartphones.

The 4K videos from the 2X tele camera lack in dynamic range big time and came way too contrasty. The detail is unimpressive, too, but there seems to be slightly more than what we observed on the clips from the main camera.

The 4K videos shot in the 5x mode are digitally zoomed from the picture coming from the 2x camera and are pretty much unusable. They are soft and blurry and inherit everything that's wrong with the 2x videos.

Now, let's talk about the 1080p video recording. The 1080p clips shot at 30fps on the main and ultrawide snappers excel in everything - resolved detail, contrast, colors, and dynamic range.

The 1080p videos taken with the 2x tele cam are sharp and have enough detail, but the dynamic range is still very low and they don't look so good.

And then the 5x digitally zoomed videos are still as awful as the 4K ones.

Shooting in 1080p at 60fps is available only on the main and ultrawide snappers. They resolved detail is halved here as the bitrate stays the same, or lower, than the 30fps samples we took. The 60fps videos from the main camera are over-sharpened in an attempt to mask the low detail, while the ultrawide footage is very soft.

You can shoot slow-mo videos with the main camera, or in macro mode with the ultrawide camera.

As we mentioned - optical stabilization is always available on the main camera. You can also enable electronic stabilization on 30fps modes but macro and it does an excellent job at smoothing the camera shake at the expense of minor loss of FoV.

The Mi Note 10 has a vlog mode for video where it lets you capture a few short clips and stitches them together while adding transitions between them. You get several options for the transitions, with names that correspond to Xiaomi's suggested use case, but they're not overly informative as to what exactly transitions you can expect.

Once you are done with the real-life scenarios, take a look at our video compare tool to see how it competes against other phones.

2160p: Xiaomi Mi Note 10 against the Mi 9T and Realme X2 Pro in our Video compare tool