Xiaomi 14 Civi Introduction:
The Xiaomi Civi line has remained in China entirely since they launched earlier this year. Well Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi finally broke the exclusivity by launching in India as well - meet the all-new Xiaomi 14 Civi. The brand says ‘Civi’ stands for Cinematic Vision in the C, indicating that a focus will be placed on producing epic landscape photos. The Xiaomi 14 Civi is equipped with Leica cameras to bring top-tier imaging features within reach of more users in line woth this vision. With the Xiaomi 14 Civi starting at under Rs 50,000 in China, the phone is intended to bring flagship-grade camera performance while delivering premium design and display. So, does it deliver on the hype? Let’s find out.
Another very stylish phone is the Xiaomi 14 Civi, which comes with a glass and leather design that feels premium in hand without adding much weight. It looks absolutely stunning and this build quality makes it one of best-designed phones under Rs. 50,000 by some distance You also benefit from a beautiful screen and Leica cameras for those who want to shoot on professional like level photography while keeping their wallet full. That said, it does fall short on battery life and enduring performance.
Xiaomi 14 Civi Display:
Without a doubt, the design of key architecture is also one of the highlights in Xiaomi 14 Civi. It appears good far away, and it feels fine in the hand. It feels nice a light in-fact at 178 grams the moment you have it in yours been. The matte metal frame brings together the quad-curved display and back panel for an attractive finish on both sides. The Cruise Blue variant that we got to review has a dual-tone back panel which uses vegan leather and patterns glass. The phone is also light and extremely thin at just 7.5mm making it very easy to hold in your hand an carry around with you wherever you want! It has an IP54 dust and limited water rating.
Also featured is an equally-crystal clear floating quad-curved display. It is covered in Corning Gorilla Glass Victus 2. The display is a 6.55-inch AMOLED panel with upto 120Hz refresh rate and up to240hz touch sampling rate. The display is a colourful one with deep blacks and high contrast out of the box. Alternatively, you could go for a slightly washed-out color palette through display properties. While displaying Dolby Vision and HDR10+, the screen peaks brightness goes up to 3000nits which only come into action when you are watching an HDR content.
Xiaomi 14 Civi Camera:
The stand out features here are the design of Xiaomi 14 Civi, as well as Leica cameras. The device is Xiaomi making its collaboration with Leica more approachable to buyers. The rear system contains a 50MP OIS main sensor, as well as optional standard optical zoom and an Ultra-wide-12MP camera from Leica.
The 50MP main camera produces vivid, very Instagram-worthy photos in the bright light of day. The colours are punchy, and the close-up shots look great too as you can see from some of the camera samples below. This camera also deals with dynamic range very well. The Leica collaboration is apparent in features such as Photo Style / Look - where both the natural colours of the new Leica Authentic Pic, and various boosted colors by enhancing two different products like "Leica Design - Vibrant Color" which boosts hues). But I discovered that with both modes, colours were generally on the saturated side. Despite both using the same 50MP Sony LYT600 sensor, during daylight shot in between Xiaomi 14 Civi's Light Hunter 800 and Realme GT Master Edition2T only latter managed to better capture on detail of ground while also giving that over all brighter look with this photo. By comparison, the Xiaomi 14 Civi opts for a much higher contrasty photo with more saturated colors
Xiaomi 14 Civi taking portraits with the a telephoto lens-ing Yes now you know what it was for Photos of 1x and 2x zoom both look nice with a wonderful bokeh. Portrait mode is also getting a few Leica-tuned filters such as saturated colours (Leica Viv), pastel-like colours (Leica Nat) and two styles of black & white for Black&White photo enthusiasts (BW modifier binding buttons: LEICA BW Nature - minimalistic style with soft gradations. There's also 35mm Documentary, 50mm Swirly Bokeh and finally for the closest focusing distance available. The presence of all these modes at your disposal provides excellent flexibility as far as clicking portrait shots is concerned; no smartphone in this category offers that freedom.
With that being said, and as you can see above the portraits taken did not all turn out right. Where the Xiaomi 14 Civi manages to offer better depth effect and edge detection but in turn smooths facial features.
For the Xiaomi 14 Civi, and adjusts its exposure decently to better suit lowlight scenes. The telephoto lens remains effective in daylight operation, low lighting is still very difficult to use without the optical stabilizing function that would otherwise ensure stable shots.
The Xiaomi 14 Civi has dual front-facing cameras. One is a 32MP primary and other one is 32MP wide lens. The primary selfie camera does a great job in daylight and produces sufficiently sharp selfies with good skin tones. Bland portrait selfies are decent too, with a natural looking background blur and edge detection. But, the wide-angle selfie camera washes out colors which makes it less attractive compared to the main selfie camera.
The Xiaomi 14 Civi is a fantastic phone for shooting video. The 3 cameras on the drone can record in up to 4K video for you content creators out there. The main camera is where you're going to get the steadiest footage as it's the only sensor with OIS support. The most noteworthy feature in videos is the Cinematic Vision mode, whereby users can record video with 21:9 aspect ratio for an immersive ultra-wide screen and subject tracking. It can also create the Dolly Zoom effect seen in films such as Vertigo, a popular technique pioneered by Alfred Hitchcock.
Xiaomi 14 Civi Performance:
The Xiaomi 14 Civi is the second phone in India after POCO F6 which launched with Snapdragon 8s Gen3 chipset. This is the processor to sit between current-gen flagship Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 and last year's Snapdragon 8 Gen2. Along with this, benchmarks also speak in a similar language as the AnTuTu score of over 14 lakhs was achieved by Xiaomi 6 Civi equipped Snapdragon 8s Gen3.
Xiaomi 14 Civi compares to its direct competitors! The Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 powering the Xiaomi 14 Civi also helped it score over around AnTuTu, scoring more than both OnePlus' OP12R (Snapdragon 8 Gen2) and Vivo's V30 Pro MediaTek Dimensity 8200. Those numbers also showed in our extensive performance comparison, where we put it against the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2-powered iQOO Neo 9 Pro and those benchmarked win helped by a performance-focused set of hardware on that phone. After that, we ran the phone through a Geekbench test to check out its single-core and multi performance in case of this device which is lowest on specs. As we can see from here, other OnePlus and Vivo phones have taken a back seat when they compared against the Xiaomi 14 Civi. With Burnout the app stresses all cores at 100 percent over a period of about 8 to minutes as it checks how much phone throttles under stress.
Xiaomi 14 Civi Software:
On the software front, you get Android 14 out of the box with HyperOS. This immediately feels inspired by Xiaomi/Redmi if you have used their phone before, familiar UI. There are 53 pre-loaded apps you start with out of the box. Some of these apps are mostly bloatware, such as Google', Xiaomi's own like Xiaomi Service+, ShareMe and Mi Store but there are dozens also by third-party developers: Netflix, Amazon (US version), Facebook etc. Most of what's new in HyperOS is designed to make the UI feel faster and more fluid, which it largely does. A ChatGPT type AI assistant is probably going to go HyperOS way at some point as well. But most of these features are missing.
Xiaomi 14 Civi Battery:
The Xiaomi 14 Civi achieves its thin and light fit by using a 4,700mAh battery, which is slightly less than the traditional 5,000mAh device found in the majority of smartphones. Do not expect to receive more. The Xiaomi 14 Civi provides long-lasting use under normal to moderate use but hardly anything greater. Otherwise, you would need to charge it once by evening or at night based on the use pattern. In the PCMark battery test, the Xiaomi 14 Civi terminated at 12 hours and 15 minutes. This is not the greatest something could achieve. It is, however, significantly lesser than what the Vivo V30 Pro and OnePlus 12 could accomplish. The Xiaomi Civi supports 67W Wattage. You also receive a 67W adapter in the case, which takes a good 40 minutes to charge the battery from 20 to 100 percent. This is a fair amount of recharging period when using a portable recharging device.
Xiaomi 14 Civi Conclusion:
With a budget of Rs 42,999 to spare one can go for the Xiaomi 14 Civi which will not just look beautiful from afar but give you that similar feel in its hand. It should also be your choice if you want solid cameras, particularly for stills and videos since its Leica filters for shots as well as the video-centric Cinematic Vision mode are ranks above-average in this class. The telephoto and wide-angle lenses could be better, some issues like smooth facial features or lack of detail in specific scenarios might get addressed with software updates along the way; overall it's a good performing camera for daily use. All in a perfectly suited designed package that also has some stunning camera features.
This content was last updated on 05 December 2024.
