The ultrawide camera of the Mi 11i doesn’t particularly enjoy the darkness, and in basic Photo mode, it captures very underexposed photos with a narrow dynamic range and little detail. There’s no Auto Night mode on this camera. With the actual Night mode enabled, you get similar results as in Photo mode with the Auto on. With the pure Photo mode, you get more natural detail rendition and overall finer detail where there’s enough light to illuminate it. Not a whole lot of detail – the images remain soft when viewed from up close, but they’ll do just fine for fit-to-screen consumption, unlike Photo mode ones. With the Auto Night mode enabled, the Mi 11i takes good photos, but ultimately not ones that make you go ‘wow.’
Mind you, it also catches a fair bit of streaks, so there is a good thing that there is a case in the box. For what it is, though, it takes good enough photos which are surprisingly sharp and detailed. The 2x toggle will get you relatively sharp and detailed zoomed-in shots from the main camera. The Mi 11X Pro is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 SoC and has a triple camera setup at the back. You can choose to take photos in the 48-megapixel mode if you want to do with extra finer details, but I didn’t see a way of leaving that mode as the default mode-it has to be manually invoked every time you close and then open the camera app.
The way that detail is rendered is close to the Mi 11 Ultra’s very conservative take in sharpening – grass and leaves look very natural. It does gives a premium look and did not attract fingerprint marks as well. Under the hood, the phone has an octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 678 SoC, as well as an Adreno 612 GPU up to 6GB of LPDDR4x RAM. Noise remains very well canceled out. Photos taken in 108MP mode come with a few downsides, most notably the 4x as large file sizes and a big hike in noise. With okay detail but quite a lot of noise and narrow dynamic range, these shots aren’t great but are ultimately usable at fit to screen if the 2x field of view is the goal.