Xiaomi Redmi Note 10S hands-on review

Camera

The Redmi Note 10S has a quad-camera setup at the back, consisting of a 64MP wide camera, an 8MP ultra-wide camera, a 2MP macro camera, and a 2MP depth sensor. There is no optical image stabilization and any stabilization done is in software.

At first glance, it seemed like the 64MP main camera could be the same as the Samsung GW3 found on the Redmi Note 10 Pro. However, after Xiaomi refused to give us a straight answer to what the sensor model is, we decided to dig a little and discovered that it is an OmniVision OV64B. Meanwhile, the 8MP ultra-wide camera uses a Sony IMX355, the 2MP macro camera uses OmniVision OV02B, and the 2MP depth sensor uses a GalaxyCore GC02M1.

The camera application is identical to other MIUI 12 devices. The main camera modes can be accessed at the bottom of the screen (in portrait) and you can either choose to have the extra modes be hidden under a separate 'More' screen or swipe up to access all of them, similar to the OnePlus Camera app.

Camera app

At the top of the screen are additional options to toggle HDR, AI mode, flash, color filters, and Google Lens. The settings panel has additional options for changing aspect ratios, countdown timers, guidelines, and enabling macro, tilt-shift, timed-burst, and Pro color modes. If you're wondering what Pro color does, it just makes the colors more saturated and less accurate, which is the opposite of what you'd think a Pro mode would do.

The actual Settings menu then has additional options, such as adding a watermark to images, smart suggestions, orientation warnings, ultra-wide distortion correction, and even options to customize the color scheme and sounds of the camera app.

Camera settings

Now, getting down to the business of image quality, let's start first with the main 64MP wide camera. The image quality from this camera is a bit disappointing. On one hand, things like color performance, dynamic range, and contrast are all adequate good, especially for the price segment.

Wide camera daylight samples

On the other hand, there is absolutely no fine detail in the images to speak of, with everything having a muddled, grainy look to it. When staring at the images at 100% zoom, they look like a watercolor painting with all fine detail and texture being non-existent. The image looks like it was upscaled from a low-resolution original image and then oversharpened aggressively to compensate.

To confirm if the issue was with the hardware or the software, we also shot a few images back to back in raw and compared them with the JPEG files from Auto and Pro modes. All the JPEG files had the same aforementioned watercolor effect to them when seen up close. However, the raw files looked just fine, and exporting them to JPEG produced much more pleasing and detailed results.

In-camera JPEG • JPEG processed from raw

In the comparison above, you can see how much more detail the image made from the raw file is compared to the JPEG generated by the phone. The phone's image looks sharper at first but it's only when you look closely do you realize that it has no actual detail, which is the opposite of the image converted from the raw file. The colors from the raw image are just to taste and not indicative of anything.

The phone has no telephoto camera so all zooming is done digitally. Even at 2x zoom, the image quality falls apart completely and the images are mushy and a complete mess.

Wide camera 2x digital zoom

The phone also allows shooting in 64MP resolution but these images have no real additional detail to offer and just waste space on the disk.

Wide camera 64MP samples

Moving on to the ultra-wide camera, we didn't notice any particular issue with the images. However, the images aren't particularly great to begin with and the 8MP resolution isn't adequate for such a wide focal length. The camera also makes little effort to match the colors of the main wide camera, so the images captured from the ultra-wide of the same subject come out much warmer and generally different looking than the main camera.

Ultra-wide camera samples

The Redmi Note 10S also has a 2MP macro camera. Like most others like it, this camera, along with the depth sensor, basically exists to fill out the spec sheet. The images captured are nothing to write home about as the camera has no autofocus, and the 2MP resolution is just not enough to capture sufficient detail even at the closeup distances. Image quality also degrades considerably in lower light levels.

Macro camera samples

The low light performance is disappointing. Shooting within the standard Photo mode, you get okay results that may or may not be usable depending upon the lighting conditions. However, it's the Night mode images that are abysmal. It's rare to see image quality somehow get worse when the Night mode is enabled, but that's exactly what's happening here.

Lowlight auto vs Lowlight Night mode

The Night mode also works only on the main wide camera, so it's not usable with the ultra-wide camera at all.

The Redmi Note 10S can capture 4K 30fps video from the main wide camera and 1080p 30fps video from the ultra-wide camera.

The 4K 30fps mode from the wide camera is practically useless, as there's no image stabilization of any sort. This results in an incredibly jerky video that becomes nearly unusable the moment you start walking with the camera.

To produce usable results, you need to drop down to 1080p 30fps mode, which is the default and what the camera will always reset to when you reopen the app. This looks decent as the image stabilization does a decent job of making the videos look watchable, so if you can't prop the phone somewhere, better use this mode.

There's also a 1080p 60fps mode but like the 4K 30fps mode, there's no image stabilization, and coupled with the generally soft image makes this mode completely useless outside of select scenarios.

Finally, the ultra-wide camera also produces stabilized 1080p 30fps videos. These videos are also usable and the wider perspective helps mitigate some of the crop from the digital stabilization. However, the videos are very soft and don't look good on anything other than smartphone displays.

We'd be remiss to not mention the issues we had shooting sample videos from this phone, or even still images for that matter. As mentioned in the performance section, the phone tends to overheat quite easily and then takes a while to cool down. This happens even more rapidly if you're outside shooting photos or videos under the sun.

While we were shooting our samples, the phone overheated to the point that while it was working the samples we shot were unusable because of all the massive stutters and frame drops recorded in them, causing us to reshoot everything once the phone had cooled down. This also affects the still photo experience but to a lesser extent. While you can't see it in the final images, the camera app becomes extremely unresponsive and photos take ages to capture and save.

We think using a case exacerbates the issue as the heat gets trapped between the phone's body and the silicone case. Unfortunately, we don't really foresee people not using cases on their phones so you should probably factor this in if you also plan on shooting outside in the sun with this phone.