Rear cameras take great photos, front camera is hit and miss

Xiaomi hasn’t had a lot of success in creating phones with great cameras, but it’s looking to turn things around with the Mi Mix 2s. With a high DxOMark score of 101 for photography, the Mi Mix 2s certainly has a lot of things going for it, at least on paper.

The two rear cameras uses 12-megapixel sensors, with the main shooter sporting a pixel size of 1.4um, 21mm wide-angle f/1.8 aperture lens with 4-axis OIS. The secondary camera is a telephoto deal, with a pixel size of just 1.0um, 26mm f/2.4 aperture lens with 2x optical zoom. Both lenses have dual pixel PDAF.

The camera of the Mi Mix 2s takes excellent photos in both bright and low light, aided by the wider than average aperture. Colors are good, though the phone does have a bit of trouble with dynamic range, even with HDR on.

Xiaomi boasts that the Mi Mix 2s has AI functionality baked in. In truth, that functionality only extends to scene recognition, wherein the camera detects what you’re trying to shoot and adjusts the settings accordingly. There isn’t AIS (AI stabilization) tech or anything fancy like that on board, unfortunately.

While the two cameras on the rear are perfectly ok, that akwardly placed, front facing camera really needs a bit of work. Images aren’t as clear as the ones taken by the rear camera. They’re not bad per se, but considering the performance of the rear cams we were a little disappointed by the result.

Battery is good enough for a day, plus Wireless charging is <3

Keeping the lights on is a 3400mAh battery that’s more than enough for a day’s worth of use. PCMark’s battery benchmark gave the phone a score of 10 hours and 31 minutes on a single charge. Once you run down the phone’s battery, fast charging gets you up and running in less than an hour, and the phone has wireless charging capabilities as well and works with Qi wireless charging standard.