Xiaomi Redmi 6: First Camera Samples

In our first impressions, the Redmi 6 is interesting because of Xiaomi's decision to return to MediaTek with the P22. Does this affect camera performance?

The Redmi 6!

Related: Xiaomi Redmi 6 Review - The capable budget phone!

The Redmi 6 carries a main camera of 12MP + 5MP w/ AF, A.I. portrait mode and LED flash while the selfie camera is a 5MP shooter. Only the main camera has an LED flash while the selfie camera doesn't have an LED or on-screen flash.

Rear dual lens cameras!

The camera app has decent features like the standard photo, portrait, square, panorama, and manual mode. In Manual mode, you can specify ISO 100 to 3200, focus, white balance and shutter speed 1/1000th of a second to 1/2 second.

How does it perform though?

Camera Samples

Daylight

Depth effect

Indoor

Lowlight

Daylight selfie

Well-lit selfie

Portrait mode selfie

Lowlight selfie

The Redmi 6 produces images with good color, deep contrast and tack sharp details in daylight. Its weakness is that it tends to struggle with balancing the exposure of the subject with some areas of the frame with high brightness. This results in a balanced exposure for the subject but in some cases the really bright areas are blown out.

The selfie camera also suffers from blowing out the over exposed areas.

Both selfie and rear cameras can take portrait shots with software based out of focus background (bokeh effect) that is mostly a miss and struggles with hair and fine jagged details.

For lowlight and indoors, the grain significantly affects the image where it lowers the sharpness because of the plentiful grain and the softening from the noise reduction. In some cases, there is a color cast. Though it may seem bad, this performs better than some of the phones in the expected price range.

All in all, the image quality is surprisingly good given that the Redmi 6 is expected to be priced under PHP 10K. The rear and selfie camera take good daylight images but suffer in balancing the exposure if the subject and the background have different light levels. An example is when some areas of the frame are brighter than the rest.

See for yourself! But, we will have to do more testing for the full review!