this is xiaomi's top end Top Dog Flagship it's called the 14 Ultra and what it is is a camera Powerhouse of a smartphone or at least the specs would say it is it's got a lot of Promise here but it also has a lot of hype and I want to try and cut through that you probably know all about this phone already if you're watching this video because it's old kind of news the time I got this it's already been announced and everyone's all seen all about it from Mobile World Congress but this is my take on it here and just for those spec lovers out there I'm going to mention a few specs but don't worry it's not going to go for long and that is it's got four 50 megapixels cameras on the rear up to 5 times optical zoom 32 megapixels camera on the front powered by the Snapdragon 8 gen 3 you probably already knew that it's topof the line it's a flagship let's take a look at this promising looking phone so this is what is included in the box we have a bit of paperwork that's in Chinese this being the import version our case type A to type c 990 W charger now I did buy this version here the Chinese version imported it from Trading Shenzhen I use them a lot they are very good it took about all up around about 11 days or so to arrive and the 14 Ultra camera kit which you can also buy from Trading shenzen you can get it for the global model too in fact the first pre-orders it was included so we get a case here that has the uh fake kind of leather to the back of it the white here I'm worried about it getting a little bit dirty later on this is a button here for the rings that you can change so it comes with this silver one you can easily slot those off and this is making it more like a real camera with interchangeable lenses and you can put on the adapter which is the other one here uh this one okay you can put that on and that will then allow you to put on filters too you can screw on filters like a UV filter or whatever you want there's a gold one there too now inside this little box here we have uh the wrist strap for the case so you don't end up dropping it and this is well it's all all in Chinese there so that doesn't really matter looking at that and of course the little uh part that slots in so not hooked up with Bluetooth now like the previous model with a 13 Ultra but this is hardwired so the latency is going to be why you won't have any latency issues this is where it locks in there's a little latch there so you flick that down that locks it into the case and then we have our two-stage button which I'm really happy with so you can press down just a little like a proper camera to focus first then take your photo this is for our zoom and this doll here we can configure now I've got it set up with a default which is exposure very handy because I think that's the I would use the most anyway most people probably would too record button real quality of this is all right it has this um suede here inside which is great and the silver and there's a type-c port now the internal battery in this is 1,500 mamp hours you can just see it written inside here and it's going to be charging then the phone at the same time which is good extends All Battery when you're taking a lot of shots and recording a lot of video and why I say the build is good I have noticed that the finish of the paint with the silver here it's not wonderful this is plastic so it could be a little bit better there but otherwise I'm being a little bit fussy here but it is very nice to have and you can see of course The xiaomi Branding I'll show you what it looks like now on the phone so the phone's thickness is 9.2 mm and xiaomi's claim is 219 g is what it weighs according to my scales however 230 you can never trust them especially xiaomi with their weights and things they always seem to have this special magical scales round down and when they measure thicknesses it also rounds down anyway let's have a look at the grip and then the case on you're looking at a total phone weight here of wo 326 G so that's pretty heavy and bulky as I'll show you so it just simply slots in like so and you flick the little lock on there and that's latched into Pace that's not going anywhere and you can see a little status LED flashing green just then it now is stating that it's quick charging that that is from that extra case and Camera grip has now been detected so I've got a few options there for it you can update the firmware uh then you've got the configuration for the button so the button can be all those different things there the dial you can change from exposure to focus to white balance uh to lots of things there again very good shortcut button and the zoom there continuous Zoom or switch your focal length your different cameras which is good but how chunky does it make it well very look at it now okay it's pretty chunky but this grip is really nice using it it's very comfortable and it really becomes and feels like I am using now a 100% uh dedicated not a DSLR but more like a point and shoot camera the feel to it okay like one of those Canon uh Power shots that everyone had remember those yep and phones killed them but anyway we got the dolls there you can easily get to that button feels very good pressing that in and I'll just show it in action too okay so you can can see you can just focus on the stats that I'm looking at here take a photo you can then adjust the exposure and the zoom too so obviously it depends what camera you're in okay I'm in the document mode that was why all right so now I can zoom in and zoom out there so very good and great addition to the phone and of course if you're getting that free with the global version if you pre-ordered then that's fantastic so then onto our build quality it is very good and xiaomi has good B quality with their flagships for many years now that I've been covering them well since the me2s in fact you can see the xiaomi there now there's a nice texture to this fake leather I just worry about how this is going to wear long term because I've had this kind of stuff before in my pocket and you eventually get like brown areas rubs with your your pockets and your jeans and whatnot so I don't think probably the best color to have in your pocket or to use without a case so the midle frame curved around the edges here you can see that camera module look at it just sticks out uh massively there and it just dominates that camera module is um yeah it's interesting well at least they made it look like a camera I don't love it I don't hate it either what do you think of it do you think it's ugly is it uh is it just too much should they make it a little bit smaller if they could well I don't think they really can although those cameras and Hardware in there so we've got loudspeaker at the top there are dual loudspeakers with this down the bottom we have our other loudspeaker type-c Port symmetry takes two Nano Sims microphone and antenna lines here yes we get video out with this it's USB 3. uh 2 I believe it is and it's just the Gen One spec so it's the 5 gbits per second but certainly beats USB 2 speeds that we used to have with xiaomi actually not that long ago it's only the last year or so they decided to up that performance so the build of it is excellent it feels really good in hand metal buttons here it's a bit heavy it's a bit chunky so they claim of course that 220 G when it's in fact 230 fingerprint read it so inbuilt of course Optical and yeah good no real complaints with it height is okay I wish it was about here about there but it's good because a lot of Brands put them right down the bottom and it feels a little uncomfortable I can easily get to those power buttons volume up and down beel here look okay so we got 32 megap camera at the front and of course it is running hyper OS Snapdragon 8 gen 3 16 gigs of RAM with this 512 GB of storage and of course the camera so all of them are 50 Maps here on the red all four cameras now you can see this one is our main camera now this is the new type of sensor which is the new 1-in type sensor it has a variable aperture so I'm just going to go along and adjust this so from a a wide 1.63 that's it not fully wide opened uh there it is fully wide open okay and then I'll just go along so anywhere in between all various different stages you can adjust it right up to a closed f 4.0 Ultra wides 12 mm which is great because a lot of them aren't that wide some of them are 14
uh millim or 13 so good to see that and the focal distance of these now is a little bit closer compared to the previous model three times optical zoom and a five times Optical this is a periscopic so that's the three times right there this is all five times that's the ultra wide care as mentioned all 50 megapixels so improvements with them and of course co-engineered with Leica as you can see Leica branding everywhere so I wanted to jump in and just show you some of the settings you get with this camera because xiaomi's gone all out with this what you can do so you can shoot in Vlog there's the option right here if you go into promote I'll show you that in just a second so frame rate up to 120 frames per second yes that's brilliant resolution up to 8K but 24 or 30 frames per second no 60 yet I think that's a little demanding too demanding for that super macro with video mode as well teleprompter motion tracking with the autofocus exposure can be controlled too uh but you probably want to go in the Pro mode for that so a lot of settings there photo uh you've got HDR of course you got your Leica settings so like a vibrant like a authentic portrait you have uh their like a portrait or you can go to master portrait which is xiaomi's own personally I find Leica portrait to be a little bit too Moody a little bit too contrasty I've been using sheli's one which I think is slightly better you can select the different cameras you want of course down here so ultrawide zoom camera uh 3.2 Optical the five once you go up to 30 times it will automatically use the AI mode okay once you go over there there's no little button anymore to enable it because it is actually done through the settings now so once it's on 30 it tells you here Ultra Zoom beta it's using AI to prove the clarity of it uh which yeah for me is not really working that good but I'll show you samples later in this video here too so portrait you got all those different options document mode more there's a lot in here director mode night mode 50 megapixel mode uh but we're going to the Pro mode that's probably the one that most people want this is what I do and use so you've got your uh sonograph here you have your histogram that you can enable to through the settings um you can see right here okay so histograms there sonogram focus peaking aspect ratio and this is where you can shoot in log so if you're going to be color GR see 4K 60 is your max you can shoot with that with log no 8K with that but if you want 8K that of course is there gr out because I have log enabled okay so there's 8K and yes at 30 frames per second that is good so this is currently in the video mode prom mode you got all the different options right here so ISO aperture Shadow rate and your white balance or whatnot and here we go this is now the pro mode so you got again the lier options there like authentic like vibrant and if you enable this here you can then go into your jpeg the ultra 50 megapixel mode there too as well and through the settings there's even more in here okay you can see a lot more options there's plenty in there image stabilization can be disabled too but only in the Pro mode for video uh Dolby Vision another really good one to have audio settings so you can put on a immersive audio or smart noise reduction depending on what you want live in a monitor too another one that's great for people that shoot a lot of video so plenty of options in here really good to see you can preserve the settings you can even shoot with the screen off that'll be great using it with the grip and the case and that is about it I know there's more in there yes you've got raw you've got a lot of different options all in there too so that is great you can see other options we have here okay quick snap back into the video mode and that is the camera app later on I'll show you the samples so the display let's talk a little bit about that HDR 10 plus display it is of course an AMOLED 6.73 in it's a Quad HD screen too so resolution is 3,200 by 1440 giving us 522 PPI so it looks very sharp now we do have a glass on this that is curved on all edges including the top some people don't like that I would prefer to be completely flat um it's a little bit like a kind of rounded bubble kind of effect to it well not really it's still a very very good screen here 120 HZ now you get a lot of Options under display here it's very responsive to touch I've had no issues it's been really good and you'll see here that we do have your typical options here color scheme you can have it in the original Pro color Vivid saturated advanced settings and you can use adapted colors if you you want or you can put it back into the original adjust the white balance a little the bezels around the outside well they're not the smallest but they're pretty good they're not bad at all and what are we looking at for brightness so I've done some testing of this their claim is 1,000 nits in the high brightness mode I have not been able to measure that just get over 800 and 3,000 Peak out in the sun or HDR mode and you can see just an indoors now compared to the s24 ultra there and the iPhone 15 Pro Max that I think it's the dll screen of the three of these phones and of course I did test this indirect sunlight you can see now uh it looked to me like the brightest and clearest is in fact the Galaxy s24 Ultra second place for me was the iPhone and third the xiaomi 14 Ultra so the screen brightness it's good but it isn't 3,000 Nets I believe that is just marketing BS from shiai one last thing on the display what about banding flicker fluidity and all that very very good I don't see any banding I don't see any flicker either everything is so Snappy so smooth that's what you'd expect out of this kind of spec and it is running hyper OS okay this is version 1.0.3 but the Chinese ROM so only English only Chinese however I can confirm that some of the things that are often issues is that it's 5G is working yes okay that is great but because it's a global ROM there are other things that aren't so Android auto does not work and it will not work unless you unlock the bootloader and maybe later we can flash a uh xiaomi EU ROM I don't know about that maybe a global not sure we'll have to see what kind of happens but if you want and need that go for the global version of course everything else seems to be fine for me 4G is also working great with no problems so it's very fast really fluid everything now the Chinese ROM here compared to the global uh this where we see another difference you're can to have a lot of Chinese blow Weare now trading Shen Jen were nice enough to go and debloated a little for me and there's just a few other apps in there but you're probably going to see a lot you're going to see maybe about 10 or so Chinese apps but you can remove them you can clean things up and then we are good so this is the last or the latest update should I say that's currently out at the time of this video it was apparently just a security patch for FIB that was it all right they didn't say it's going to do anything for the cameras I hope that xiaomi does not leave this model high and dry like they did with the what one was it the Mi 11 Ultra and the 10 Ultra those ones but just kind of left high and dry and then the 13 as well has had some updates uh okay safety net check did that and yes it gets a pass so banking apps and things uh should be all working fine we do have a wide Vine level one and I can confirm Netflix is in full HD and we do have with this model here you can see Dolby Vision hdr10 hdr10 Plus hlg uh camera to probe API probe level three which is a full support but this you wouldn't really be using that you need to use the stock camera app especially with this phone with all the options you're not going to get it with third party camera apps 5G tested the speeds and pretty bad uh not that great with my other phones I can get about uh 80 megabits per second downloads and uploads for some reason it's a little slower so that's one thing I wanted to point out too that you might not get the fastest kind of speeds uh compared to the global model just be aware of that and and22 version 10.2.3 shows that we've got a fast phone here very quick indeed it can go over 2 million points there for the score and you see that it did heat up 12.1 de I felt the phone getting extra hot I was using the performance mode activated via
the battery settings finally storage speeds ufs 4.0 512 GB wor very good we're getting over 4,000 for sequential reads sequential rights just over 3,000 and very good random acccess speeds they are some of the best I have seen well over a thousand there so there are no bottlenecks with this at all it really doesn't have any because the storage is not going to slow it down and definitely not that chipset and then stressing it out pushing it really hard with the wildlife extreme stress test that goes for 20 minutes you can see that it drops down here the stability to 73.2% so we're looking at a 26.8% drop in performance from the top score to the lowest temperatures well it gets very hot gets up to 51° C and I felt this one gaming that especially the frame and then the back of it gets really warm and I don't really think that this synthetic leather and having the case on too is going to help of course with those thermals it's an insulator there and it probably build up a little bit of heat from that now a charge time at 90 WS very good 34 minutes to go from 16% to 100% and battery life so far in my testing that I've done I tried to run the PC Mark fix test that I always do but it keeps crashing but you're looking at around about 8 and 1 half hours of on screen time uh that's for the light test now gaming I managed to go through that battery gaming in about 5 hours and using the camera a lot yesterday when I was taking all my camera samples and everything I chewed through this battery and only 6 hours hours so battery life is looking um average it doesn't look amazing uh depending on what you're doing but I think most people should be able to make it through a full day with the xiaomi 14 Ultra and this was asked about Wi-Fi calls yes they do work you can see Wi-Fi calling here you can see it's Spain HD and the quality is very good so if you like your Wi-Fi calls then this phone has it which is really good and you can record with the Chinese ROM version that I have here the calls but I don't believe you can record the calls with the global version pretty sure you can so call Quality is excellent that I'm hearing out of this both with the Wi-Fi calls on and off just normal Sim calls good too hapex is really nice nice big strong pulses and I'm going to play you also now a track here from this which is NCS and it's non-copyright songs that's the reason I'm using it I don't like the genre music or this track or anything like that uh but let's have a listen to what it sounds like so sound comes from here and here and I'll make sure that I do have this set yes to 100% volume gaming performance well no surprises that it's as expected for the Snapdragon 8 gen 3 it's very good runs really well and you do have their game Turbo so if you wanted to run that you just simply need to swipe here from the side it brings it up and here's a few other things you can adjust so I've got it IM balanced I noticed in Balan I sometimes get some frame train dips down to 46 frames per second in performance it really does reduce that but overall all the games out there they're going to be playable play really well on this and yeah it does get hot to the touch certainly heats up after gaming a bit you feel it around the back here around the frame especially too it will get warm when you're gaming oh accelerometer there we go little bit slow then so with our cameras here this is the front facing 32 megap camera yes there is finally and has been now since the previous model 4K uh it took them a long time but they finally got there after years and years and years falling behind the competition now what I've noticed with the front-facing Vlog footage is it does tend to overexpose a tad and in fact I see that generally with these cameras that you could always turn down that exposure a bit and it needs it just with the default settings so 4K 30 here at the moment you've got 4K 62 as well the front facing camera with the electronic image there stabilization and the quality is decent but look at the way it's exposing the clouds here I know it's trying to expose my face and it's doing a good job of that but the background's a little bit blown out and that's why I think that the exposure needs some tweaks and that's what I'm generally seeing here is that the firm is quite early especially the camera optimization it does need a bit of work as you'll see so this is our rear 50 megapixel camera very good stabilization I noticed that the newer 50 megapixel sensor 1in type 1 seems to have better I think Optical image stabilization than the previous generation so I can go over to the ultra wide on the Fly of shooting 4K 30 if you're in 8k mode you can't now there's no time limit with 8K which is good I go over to the 3.2 times Optical see that transition well it could be a little bit smoother but it's quick it's fast doesn't look too bad and I go over to the five times periscopic camera looking at the castle here now there is a bit of wind so we're going to have some wood noise and I can zoom in a little bit more take it up to 10 times here and you can see of course the quality has degraded somewhat quite a bit it wouldn't go over 10 times even that's not looking that great this is now 8K footage now you can shoot AK with the other camera so the 3.2 Optical and the five
times what I've noticed though is that those Zoom cameras they don't seem to be a proper 8K at least not to me it looks like upscaled 4K and here this has a bit of a crop to it okay so it's not a full proper 8K but it's got the electronic image stabilization now the footage does look a little bit more detailed but not by much compared to 4K and I noticed that when you're pan around you will maybe see a few little jutters and some drop frames even though when I look at media info it's 30 frames per second it seems to still happen in a little bit more if you're shooting uh 8K 30 frames per second and you pan around but good to see they added the 30 fr frames per second option because before with xiaomi it was only 24 frames per second which looked a little choppy to me this is 8k now with a 3.2 times camera and if you do happen to look at this on the 8K or even 4K TV you notice that it doesn't quite look native I don't think this is a proper 8K resolution um this is only just an assumption I have here but I do believe it's just upscaled maybe from like 4K HK now five times Optical looking at the castle of D here now I could apply and W A little bit of Zoom here but I can't swap over those cameras on the go so that's seven times 8K stabilization is reasonably good very good main camera has the best stabilization periscopic probably the worst this is really cool the 4K 120 frames per second slowed to 30 frames per second check it out over to Steel so this is the ultra wide and it looks all right but you crop in and well not really that good but main camera very good lots of detail contrast colors looking okay this is our 3.2 times Optical very nice clean looking shot if maybe a bit oversharpened a little and the five times Optical but it's not all bad news for that Ultra wide if you happen to take a shot this time in the sun before it was overcast looks a lot better A lot sharper super clear photo I like what I'm seeing colors are good this is the vibrant reset and this is our five times optical zoom camera just look at all those details there great my favorite has been the macro mode that can take some really good looking shots you can see even dust and all sorts of detail really good there now you can choose between a depth of field being shallow or extended too I did find it good for taking photos like this closeup here of for example product shocks that you get a lot of details and really nice attractive looking background blur lowl light photos without turning on the night shot mode have a lot of noise to them but some of the other shots that I use with the night mode on looked pretty good although the contrast here the blacks tend to be a little bit grayish and not a deep black I don't really know what's going on here this was the Leica vibrant mode so there's still again a little bit of room there for tweaking and improving things certainly with camera software updates they can get a lot more out of these sensors but comparing it to the vi X100 Pro lowlight performance I think the Vivo definitely pulls ahead it has less noise the images look a little sharper and clearer too like authentic versus Zeiss natural there is a difference and more true to life I found to be the X100 Pro with the Zeiss optimization here and the colors of the red flow slightly better I think with the X100 Pro it's close but there is a difference shallow depth of field was sometimes working against the shiai so it's got a very narrow field of focus and I tapped on the same point and you can see that the focus is actually not where I tapped right in the center the Vivo got this the Vivo got the different shades of yellow less clipping overall better from the Vivo X100 Pro it takes Superior photos I feel also so did find that the zoom shots with the Vivo X100 Pro are better than the xiaomi this is at 30 times Zoom both of them are terrible okay but there is one that's slightly better and that is the Vio the xiaomi is using some AI technique uh to make this 30 times look a little better but in fact it doesn't seem to really do much then finally portrait shots with the xiaomi 14 Ultra I like them they're not bad the stitching's good however they're a little soft some people may like this I did a comparison as you can see compared to the X100 Pro again and I prefer the X100 Pro portraits everyone I've asked also comments the same I think the skin tones look more pleasant it's a little a little bit sharper doesn't look as soft and overall just a more pleasant portrait build quality of the phone excellent speakers do sound great I mentioned they could be just the Tad louder that's me being fussy and comparing it to some other phones it isn't the loudest but they sound very good the screen brilliant but not the brightest I really doubt that 3000 nit claim it was xiaomi that started doing these uh while in HDR you can get XYZ brightness yet no one can actually ever seem to measure that although I can't with my meters that I've got here but we'll take their word for it it's bright yes but when I compared it as you saw from that clip next to the iPhone next to the Samsung it certainly was not the brightest to my eyes there so there's something going on but anyway uh the cameras let's talk about the cameras it's all about the cameras now with these phones well especially when you call them Ultra especially when you give them this grip and you partner with like it of course so initial first impressions were a tad bit disappointing and well well well hang on show me Fanboys in the comments hang hang on I'm coming from this which is the Vivo X100 Pro okay and this is I still think it's the top dog and from what I've seen so far it still is I still think it does the best macro shots best color um reproduction to as well especially with the Zeiss natural mode versus the Leica um what do they call it Leica authentic sorry yeah they're good but I'd say this one's more closer to true to life from what Vivo has optimization here they have that floating lens as well well with the 4.3 times optical zoom camera that I think is a little bit better in terms of Zoom that you get out of the five times Optical with the Xiaomis got a lot of promise but I'm seeing some early firmware issues camera Optimizer issues really that is slight overexposure on literally all the photos that I've seen especially portraits could be a China ROM thing the Chinese do like to have really white ghostly looking skin for some reason and portraits could be that so Globe will probably tone down on that video quality I find to be good but I find that the zoom video quality um a little disappointing especially when you put it into 8K mode you'd expect uh more definition expect more details and really it just adds more noise and looks like upscaled 4K which is what I'm assuming it actually probably is with those Zoom cameras good to have those options with all the video Dolby Vision HDR 4K 120 frames per second it goes on and on there's so many options and even depth of field you can adjust you can have a shallow depth of field or an extend into depth of field when you are in the macro mode which is good to see you get some good results with that but like the 13 Ultra I find a little hit and miss those cameras um I find the point of focus is very narrow your focal point there and I often find where I tap to focus and you'll see this in my camera comparison I'm working on will actually not be the point I tapped on so it's why it's a little hit in mess I find some of those photos you look at them and zoom in and go you know that's not quite as good as I was hoping hoping it would be considering it's the new generation of 1in type sensor the partnership would like a yada yada yada y all the lenses all that's gone into it so at the moment what I'm feeling it feels a bit overhyped it feels like a just a incremental bump up from the 13 Ultra slightly better better focus better options yes it's all good to see this the 4K with the front video it is an excellent phone don't get me wrong but what I'm seeing is I think Stills at least this is the King this is the X100 Pro and they still have the X100 Ultra to come and no Vivo has not paid me for this video neither is XEL me no one has
2024-03-14