Xiaomi Redmi Note 8 Pro long-term review

Display

The Redmi Note 8 Pro has an LCD panel, so you won't be getting any of the 'wow' factor of OLEDs with their nominally infinite contrast ratios and proper deep blacks. It's also not the best LCD screen ever (those can pretty much only be found on the iPhones that haven't switched to OLED in this day and age), but it gets the job done.

Sunlight legibility is okay, but not record-breaking, as is overall brightness. On the brightness topic, note that the dimmest the auto brightness setting is still pretty bright, but you can sort of alleviate this by using MIUI's deceptively named Night mode.

That will make the screen even dimmer if you're in a pitch-black environment and take the brightness slider manually all the way down. Fun fact: if you don't do this, then it will never automatically go all the way to the left. That's just an MIUI quirk, as is the fact that you still can't tap anywhere on the slider to quickly adjust the setting; instead, you have to slide your finger across it. We really hope MIUI 12 fixes this minor annoyance.

Because it's not OLED, there's no always-on display here, as that would kill your battery life since no matter how little content it shows you, the LCD screen needs to light up all of its backlighting LEDs.

You do get a notification LED though on the Redmi Note 8 Pro, which blinks white to let you know you've got something you need to attend to. This is one of those features that most flagships have left behind (along with the 3.5mm headphone jack), and it's interesting to see it alive and well here. However, you don't get to customize its colors based on which app is notifying you, or anything like that - it's a simple on/off switch that you get in Settings, and that's it. Still, better than nothing.

The display colors skew cold in the default setting, but an easy fix is to just go with the Warm tone in Settings, which is what we did. The Auto setting says it will automatically adjust based on ambient lighting, which sounds to us like something similar to Apple's TrueTone, but it either doesn't work like that or the effect is so subtle that we never actually noticed. Still, we chose this setting because Saturated takes things to an extreme, while Standard mode just doesn't make anything 'pop' at all on the screen.

There are some halos around the notch if you look really closely, which we assume are due to the LCD tech and the way it needs an array of LEDs to light up pixels. We've also spotted some very mild brightness irregularities - as in, it's not exactly the same everywhere. Again, this is most likely due to edge LED lighting being used, and thus an inherent compromise you'll need to live with. That said, this is one of the reasons this phone can be so cheap, and most people will not notice unless they really go hunting for it. Also, there's some yellowing around the bottom of the screen, at least on the Warm color setting we were using, but again, nothing to be too concerned about.

Resolution-wise the panel is fine, there are still many flagship offerings using 1080p+, and since this is an LCD you might call this 1080p 'truer' than that of OLEDs, which use a sub-pixel arrangement that isn't plain RGB. But that's a pointless debate we're not going to get into, we just thought you'd like to know that for most scenarios unless you're really sensitive to screen sharpness, you won't feel like you'd need a higher-res panel. It's actually sort of neat that mid-rangers this cheap now have pretty much the same resolution out of the box as some of Samsung's much more expensive flagships.

Display-related software features

The Reading Mode is Xiaomi's blue light filter, and it works as it should. There's really nothing more we can say about it, you can schedule it if you want, or manually turn it on, and there's a slider that lets you play with its intensity. Your eyes will thank you if you use your phone at night a lot, especially before going to sleep.

Display settings

Weirdly enough, you can 'turn off' the notch, and MIUI 11's settings for this are the most comprehensive we've seen. You get two options for that, one which just puts a black bar around it without moving icons around, the other that does move icons lower. But you probably shouldn't use either, because this is an LCD screen and remember, blacks aren't 'pure' black so the effect isn't that you'll just stop noticing the notch entirely, unlike with OLED screens. Also, we're very much used to such small notches by now and don't find them disturbing at all. If you do, maybe give this one a few days - you might come to grips with it.

Notch hiding