Xiaomi 12T Pro review

Xiaomi 12T Pro is a new mid-range smartphone from the Chinese brand that aims to deliver a high-end photo experience on a phone that doesn’t break the bank. For the most part, this phone offers amazing value for money thanks to its 6.67-inch Dynamic AMOLED display and 200MP primary lens. However, it’s hard to ignore the cut corners here to get all this value in a phone that costs almost R15,000. For starters, this phone doesn’t have wireless charging, which is pretty standard these days. It also lacks an official IP rating, which means unlike most other phones on the market, it’s not water and dust resistant.

Watch the Xiaomi 12T Pro review in video form below

Instead of focusing on a few key features, Xiaomi has instead packed this phone with a 200MP camera lens and 120W charging. Both can be half specified in order to budget for at least some waterproofing.

Other than that, the Xiaomi 12T Pro is a great device and the main selling point here, the 200MP camera, does a good job. It’s one of the highest megapixel camera sensors you can get on a phone and it produces amazing photos. Unfortunately, the secondary camera lenses aren’t even half as good, so you’ll probably never use them.

Other specs of the Xiaomi 12T Pro include a 5000mAh battery, 5G support, and a Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 processor. This meant that everything I threw at the phone ran smoothly and without issues except water of course, because you know… a delicate matter.

The Xiaomi 12T Pro doesn’t look great at all. It has a large screen on the front with a punch-hole front camera. The back is glass and the frame is plastic. There’s a giant camera sensor on the back which includes the following camera array:

• 200 MP, f/1.7, (wide), 1/1.22″, 0.64µm, PDAF, OIS
• 8 MP, f/2.2, 120˚ (ultrawide), 1/4″, 1.12µm
• 2 MP, f/2.4, (macro)
• [email protected]And the [email protected]/60fps, [email protected]/ 60/120/240 fps, HDR10+

At the top, you’ll find the Harmon Kardon logo as the speakers are brand-backed. More information on this shortly. There’s also an IR blaster which is another weird addition. There’s a USB C charging port at the bottom, there are no buttons on the left side, and the volume rocker and power button on the right.

The Xiaomi 12T Pro is 8.6mm thick and weighs over 200g. It also includes an under-display fingerprint scanner and facial recognition, but it’s not as secure as Apple’s FaceID. The overall design is quite modest, to say the least. The black model is a niche for the sun, but I’ve seen it in blue and it’s much better. Be wise when shopping for your ideal.

The screen is absolutely amazing on this phone. It packs a 6.67-inch 120Hz AMOLED with 446 pixels per inch. It gets very bright with a peak brightness of 900 nits for HDR and Dolby Vision content and runs at around 500 nits in daily use. The screen’s refresh rate is adaptive, meaning it changes based on what you’re doing. I can also set it manually to save battery. The screen does not have the highest resolution. It’s only 1220 x 2712 but things are still crisp and clear.

The overall performance of the Xiaomi 12T Pro is decent. I played a few games and while the phone was warm it was manageable. The in-game overlay also helped me improve my gaming performance to take advantage of the screen refresh rate. I also ran some benchmarks and got the following scores:

• geekbench
  • single-core – 1340
  • Multicore – 4028

Xiaomi 12T Pro Camera System

Xiaomi proves once again that you can squeeze every possible megapixel into a camera, but that doesn’t make it a good camera. While the 200MP sensor is decent, it’s no better than the viewfinder with 50MP. That means that camera sensor isn’t bad, but you really don’t need 200MP to get what you get on the 12T Pro.

200MP main lens

By default, the camera takes a photo with a resolution of 12.5 megapixels. You can choose to use all 200MB in one shot, but those photos will likely take up almost 100MB of space per shot. 200MP stills also take seconds to shoot and aren’t ideal for most photography either. You can choose the 50MP capture mode which results in smaller photos and faster shooting.

The 200MP snapshot mode is convenient for two reasons. First of all, if you ever need to print giant billboards using the photos you take, you can do it with these large files. Second, you can crop these images very well and still get a detailed shot.

200MP main lens

Overall, the 200MP lens does a good job of capturing photos and shooting content. The AI ​​on the phone sharpens things up a bit for my taste. As a result, some images looked a bit noisy.

I was very impressed with the low light capabilities of the main lens. The phone normally takes photos at night without entering manual night mode. These photos also came out much brighter than I expected.

2 megapixel macro lens

Unfortunately, the other two lenses are just awful. The 2MP macro lens doesn’t perform well even in average light and shots are blurry and unsightly. The 8MP wide lens is far too low in megapixels to output anything close to the main lens. You should probably avoid using these two after mastering the main objective simply because they are so different.

I was also impressed with the overall video quality of the phone. It records up to 8K 30fps but you’ll probably have to stick with 4K video to enjoy some stabilization.

200MP night shot

When it comes to battery life, the Xiaomi 12T Pro does a decent job all day. I was able to use the phone all day and still have 20% left at night sometimes. That’s about 10-12 hours of general use on a single charge. he is magnificent.

The 120W charger also means this phone can charge to 70% in just 15 minutes and fill up in less than 30 minutes. I understand it’s convenient, but I can’t help but worry about battery health and life with the 120W charging getting hot, but the cell so much. Honestly, I would choose a lower wattage charger just to save on battery damage.

Other than that, overall use of the Xiaomi 12T Pro has been a pleasure. I hated the phone’s MIUI 13 operating system bloatware, but browsing and using the phone was never a problem. The control panel is notably much cleaner than most Android phones, and the overall look is quite clean and sleek.

Xiaomi says this phone will get three years of Android updates and four years of security patches, which is also good news.

Overall, I wish Xiaomi would add things like wireless charging and waterproofing to this phone. 200 MP is also overkill and it could be 150 MP in favor of wireless charging. However, it’s still a decent phone overall for a competitive price.