It’s a new year, and that means it’s time for a brand new flagship smartphone from Xiaomi with the Xiaomi 13 Pro. This year’s model is particularly exciting, as it incorporates a brand new camera system designed in partnership with Leica. It brings the 1-inch sensor first unveiled in the Xiaomi 12S Ultra, as well as an optical zoom lens, 8K video recording, 120 watt fast charging, a 1900-nit peak brightness, and more. It’s competing with the biggest smartphones on the market today, so is it worth considering for your next upgrade?
Specifications
Current Price: ~$1000
Xiaomi 13 Pro - What Is It? (Overview)
The Xiaomi 13 Pro is the latest flagship smartphone from Xiaomi. As one of the biggest technology companies in the world, Xiaomi plays a major role across many industries, but smartphones are one of its biggest sectors. In fact, as of the end of 2022, it was the third largest smartphone manufacturer in the world, behind Samsung and Apple, shipping 33.2 million phones and holding 11% of the global market share. Considering that its phones aren’t widely available in the United States while Apple and Samsung both are, that’s impressive. Globally, they’re incredibly well known and clearly a very popular choice.
The 13 Pro is similar to the 12T Pro I reviewed in October but brings with it a substantial number of improvements that make it a competitive choice, even against the likes of the Samsung S23 Ultra. This is especially true if photo and video quality rank at the top of your priority list. It features all of the top-tier specs you would expect, but the improvements to the camera system set it apart and make it one of the most compelling smartphone photography options on the market today.
Like its predecessor, the Xiaomi 13 Pro is a large smartphone with a 6.73 inch AMOLED display. Despite its large size, one-handed operation is easier than the Galaxy S22 or S23 Ultra models thanks to an ever-so-slightly narrower design. As you would expect from a premium smartphone, the front and back are Gorilla Glass Victis with an aluminum frame. The front display has curved edges, which you either love or hate, but is in keeping with Xiaomi’s flagship design.
The display comes in at 3200x1440 resolution and offers a crisp, vibrant picture. There is plenty of detail available in the screen with its 522 pixels per inch and bright 1,900 nit peak brightness. While you’ll only see those levels in highlights, it’s able to maintain a typical brightness of 1,200 nits, which is perfect for general use even in direct sunlight. It also offers adaptive sync up to 120Hz for smooth animations and a responsive 240Hz touch sampling rate.
The screen is also quite vibrant without exaggerating colors to noticeably inaccurate levels. It comes factory calibrated with a Delta E of only 0.28. It offers support for all of the most popular HDR formats, including HDR10+, HDR10, HLG, and Dolby Vision. Streaming services like Netflix and Disney Plus automatically detect HDR compatibility and stream with high dynamic range, making it a good fit for entertainment on the go.
Under the hood, the 13 Pro features an upgraded Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 SoC. As the latest and greatest mobile chip on the market as of this writing, you can expect top-tier performance in apps and games, something we’ll illustrate in the performance section of this review. It uses 12GB of LPDDR5X memory and the option for 256GB or 512Gb of system storage. It supports up to Wi-Fi 7 for forwards compatibility, as well as Bluetooth 5.3. It can also be activated on two separate networks thanks to its dual SIM slot; however, we recommend looking closely at the supported bands and cross-referencing that with those used by your mobile provider to ensure compatibility.
I’ll save a detailed discussion of the cameras for its next section, but it’s worth breaking down exactly what this new model has in store for us. Xiaomi partnered with camera legend, Leica, on the design of its camera system here, and it’s composed of three lenses on the rear, and another high resolution shooter behind the front display. The main shooter is a wide angle lens with a 23mm focal length and low f/1.9 aperture. It utilizes a 1-inch Sony IMX989 camera sensor for improved details and low light performance. A 75mm telephoto lens offers optical zoom of 3.2x and an f/2.0 aperture. The final rear camera is a f/2.2 aperture ultra-wide with a 14mm (0.6x) focal length. All three cameras feature a 50MP resolution while the front selfie camera is 32MP.
The 1-inch sensor is incredibly important and unlocks a new realm of mobile photography. It’s the same size sensor as in professional point-and-shoot cameras like the Sony RX100 VII, a camera that’s regularly used by professional photographers when they need to travel light. Simply put, a larger sensor is able to gather more light and retain more detail in photos. A 1-inch sensor means better photos without relying on cloud processing each image and ML trickery to enhance portable shots.
On the video front, the Xiaomi 13 Pro is able to deliver high resolution video capture with impressive detail, even at high frame rates. From the rear camera, it’s able to record at 720p30, 1080p30, 1080p60, 4K24, 4K30, 4K60, or 8K24. The selfie camera can record at 720p or 1080p at 30 FPS. It also has plentiful video modes to add movie effects, clone images, record from the front and rear cameras simultaneously and even create your own VLOG introduction comps.
Its battery is a touch smaller than the Galaxy S23 Ultra’s 5,000mAh at 4,820mAh but is about 500mAh larger than the iPhone 14 Pro Max. The battery runs efficiently but total battery life depends on how bright you’re running the screen and what you’re doing with it, so whether it exceeds or falls short of those phones is hard to say. I don’t have either on hand, but I was able to test it against the Xiaomi 12T Pro and Galaxy S22 Ultra, my daily driver, and the 13 Pro consistently had more battery at the end of each day across two weeks of testing.
If it does run short, it also comes with a whopping 120 watt fast charger. We’ve seen this for a while on Xiaomi flagship phones but it’s worth highlighting again: while the rest of the industry is removing charging bricks from the box and charging another $50 to buy one separately, Xiaomi not only gives you one but they give you an incredible one. The stock charger with the S23 Ultra is 45 watts; the iPhone 14 Pro Max is 27 watts. While the 120 watt charger with the 13 Pro is larger, it’s also able to completely recharge your phone in only 19 minutes from being completely dead.
Of course, it’s not all perfect. The phone continues the trend of not supporting MicroSD storage expansion and there’s no headphone jack either. The MIUI 14 operating system, and really the overall design of the phone itself are becoming quite familiar. Even though it pays dividends in image quality, the 13 Pro also has a large camera bump that will surely fall afoul of the thin and light crowd.
Xiaomi 13 Pro - Cameras and Image Performance
With that background out of the way, unless you’re a power user, the biggest reason to choose the Xiaomi 13 Pro is certainly the camera system, so let’s take a closer look at the images it’s able to produce.
One important thing to note is that the camera offers two modes: Leica Authentic and Leica Vibrant. Vibrant mode enhances colors and made for more appealing pictures in my tests. Authentic mode embraces more natural color science and enhanced contrast between light and shadows. All of the images gathered for this review were done in Vibrant mode.
Using the main lens with its larger sensor results in the best image quality. The camera is able to capture an impressive amount of detail and does an excellent job balancing out its colors. Unlike most smartphones, the 13 Pro doesn’t lean into overexposing images to make them look good. This leads to more realistic pictures that require less manual tweaking to get right on the phone itself. In some of the wintery, overcast shots this had the effect of making the images look a bit more blue and dreary than it did in real life, but overall, it’s very close.
One of the neat side-effects of having a 50MP main shooter on a large sensor is that cropping in to 2x doesn’t result in major detail loss. You can see this in the images above. The first shot is 1x while the second is a 2x, a crop of the main sensor. Both have very good detail and are completely usable images.
Portrait Mode can deliver some excellent results but seems like it needs a software update to bring it up to where it needs to be. Given that I’m working with pre-release software, that’s understandable and something I expect to be updated in time. There’s a noticeable softening of the image that occurs in this mode and I found that the camera struggled if there were bright light sources behind the subject.
Likewise, you’ll occasionally see situations where the camera struggles with exposure, such as the pictures above. My youngest son’s right cheek is blown out; however, retaking this same picture only a second later resulted in a fine image. Worse, there were multiple instances where I would tap on the face I wanted to focus on and the camera would dramatically underexpose, as you can see in the second picture above. In the final picture, the camera showed the bokeh effect applied but then didn’t in the final picture. This occurred multiple times, especially if I was trying to shoot a plant or animal.
On the plus side, the camera does apply a motion-tracking auto-focus that utilizes the eyes, so it wasn’t often necessary to tap to find focus if I was shooting one of my kids.
The selfie portrait mode works phenomenally. It tends to nail focus and does an excellent job of applying bokeh.
The low light performance of the camera is excellent. You’ll forgive the lack of dark outdoor shots as the tail end of my review window coincided with a winter ice storm here in NY, but I snapped a couple of example shots here in my office. Note that the first selfie and the Kiwi Ears box were in a dark room. Curtains were drawn, my computer monitor was on. That’s it. The rest is the night mode of the camera doing a great job of pulling color and detail from a very challenging scenario. The final (silly) shot is in a completely dark room with only the phone screen acting as a light source.
The camera also comes with a Super Macro mode that is easily the best I’ve ever seen on a smartphone. The pictures are detailed and comparatively high resolution at 9.4MP each. As you can see, there is a lot of detail in these pictures, making this quite a capable macro shooter.
Finally, I wanted to include a selection of product photography shots because they really illustrate the benefits of the camera. Product shots rely on detail, even close-up. Over the years of shooting products, I’ve used everything from full mirrorless camera setups with lighting rigs to my current standard, the Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra, and post-processing in Adobe Photoshop.
That last step is by far the most important. Without it, it would be painfully obvious that my pictures are being shot with a smartphone. Because, while smartphone photography has come a long way, in these close-up, highly detailed scenarios, the shortcomings of their tiny sensors become apparent.
Here, we can see the major improvements the 13 Pro brings. Note that there isn’t any loss of detail in these close-up shots. As you move to the edge of the focus region, you don’t see the image begin to distort and smear (something that is extremely obvious with white-on-black text like these keycaps). Instead, you have a more natural bokeh effect, crisp images, and none of the artifacts of other smartphone cameras. For product photography, Xiaomi’s flagship is leagues ahead.
Xiaomi 13 Pro - Overall Performance
To test the overall performance of the phone, I used a combination of real-world daily use, Geekbench 5, and 3DMark. The new SOC and high-speed memory allow it to shine.
As you can see in the test above, it delivers excellent results in Geekbench. Within its database, it wipes the floor with the S21 Ultra… but of course it would. Here’s how it compares to the S22 Ultra and last generations 12T Pro:
The Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 is a powerhouse. For general processing, it absolutely outperforms the S22 Ultra and has a substantial lead over the 12T Pro, too.
For gaming, it delivered smooth frame rates and consistent performance, even after an hour in Genshin Impact. In the tests above, you can see that it simply overpowered the Slingshot test (no surprise there) and that it topped out just above 3000 points on the Wild Life Extreme 4K gaming test, averaging 18 FPS. In contrast, the 12T Pro only scored 2,798 on the same test and average 16.8 FPS.
These results don’t really get at consistency, though, so I also ran it through a stress test of Wild Life Extreme to see how thermals would impact frame rate.
For gaming, it doesn’t get much better than the Xiaomi 13 Pro. Xiaomi has nailed the thermal performance of the phone. Even as temperatures reached their peak, there was virtually no change in performance. This kind of consistency means that you can game with smooth, playable frame rates and no concern for the game becoming unplayable over time. It also means you won’t need to worry about investing in an aftermarket cooler.
For day to day use, the phone performs very well. The 120Hz adaptive refresh rate makes scrolling web pages smooth and there’s barely any slowdown to be had thanks to its excellent CPU. I’ve used it for everything from browsing Twitter to writing essays in Google Docs, and it is just as speedy and responsive as you would except a flagship smartphone to be.
Final Thoughts
Taken as a whole, the Xiaomi 13 Pro is a very impressive phone that’s an excellent choice for creators and photo-fans. At the time of this writing, final pricing is unavailable but is estimated to be around $1,000 USD upon its international release. At that price, it’s more expensive than the Pixel 7 Pro but is substantially cheaper than the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra and iPhone 14 Pro Max. Put another way, it’s competing directly with the biggest players in the market.
While the 13 Pro doesn’t stack up in cloud computational horsepower like its counterparts, it makes up for that with one of the biggest camera sensors available on a smartphone today and outstanding performance overall. While the portrait mode leaves something to be desired at the time of this writing, we expect that to be updated over time from our pre-release version, and in fairness, it can also deliver some excellent results in the right circumstances. It also doesn’t suffer from the usual shortcomings of smartphone cameras, particularly in close-up shorts where they’re most apparent, so it’s a trade-off and waiting game I’m comfortable with at this point.
Add to that excellent gaming performance, snappy day to day usage, and you have an excellent contender for your next upgrade. If you want the best picture quality, especially in low light, and don’t want to trust AI to get you there, this is an outstanding option.
The product described in this article was provided by the manufacturer for evaluation purposes.
