Xiaomi Redmi Note 8 Pro long-term review

Camera

Traditionally, this is one area where mid-rangers fall short of their flagship brethren, and for understandable reasons. High-end smartphone camera systems these days cost a whole lot, and it's not even just all about the hardware - there's a lot of work (a.k.a man-hour expenses) to be put into the software side as well.

The Redmi Note 8 Pro tries to get you to forget about all this with its high megapixel count main camera, but in the end camera image quality is one of the compromises you'll be making if you purchase this phone. It's important to get the context right here, though. Hopefully no one is expecting a phone that costs this little to be able to go head-to-head with the best out there in image quality. And, sure enough, the Note 8 Pro doesn't.

However, it does produce passable results for the price, and is actually very similar in output to what flagships were capable of a few years ago. That tells you how much of a focus (pun intended) cameras have been in recent times for flagships, and it also means that within a couple of years or so you shouldn't be surprised if what is currently considered top-notch camera quality will trickle down to mid-rangers as well.

Long intro aside, the camera app is exactly what you'd expect if you've ever used another Xiaomi or Redmi phone with MIUI 10 or 11. There's the viewfinder that allows for sliding through modes and all that. Interestingly, while the Note 8 Pro has a dedicated macro camera like the Mi Note 10, you access it differently. In the Mi Note 10 this was a "zooming option", that showed up in the viewfinder and you could select it the same way you select using the ultra-wide or either of the zoom lenses. On the Redmi, though, you need to tap on a dedicated Macro icon in the top bar of the camera app in order to trigger the macro shooter. This might mean you could forget about there even being a macro camera in there because it's not part of the magnification options in the viewfinder.

Although the phone doesn't have a zoom lens, you do get an option for 2x shots, which are cropped from the main sensor. This is an interesting solution, and works decently as you'll see from our samples. Even if you're not entirely satisfied with the Note 8 Pro's zoom output, we still think this is a good option to have.

Camera samples

Okay, on to samples now. As always with Quad-Bayer sensors, note that we're only showing pixel binned results, which is what the phone shoots in Auto mode. There's an option to go full 64MP, but such sensors aren't really meant to be used like that, and in 9 cases out of 10, the 16 MP shot with pixel binning will turn out better.

The main camera on the back produces good looking images when there's adequate lighting around. There's some oversharpening going on if you take a closer look, and the dynamic range could be better. You do however get plenty of detail, very good contrast, and colors that look nice without being too artificially saturated.

Daytime camera samples from the main sensor

The ultrawide camera is a low-cost unit, and that shows in the pictures it produces. Even in the best weather conditions, there's a very visible hit in the output quality compared to shooting with the main camera. Colors are fine and similar to what you get from the main sensor though. But the photos are soft, dynamic range is bad, and the detail is disappointing. It's good that you have it though, at least for those cases where the different perspective it provides is worth the tradeoff in image quality.

Daytime camera samples from the ultrawide

On the other hand, the 2x zoom shots cropped from the main sensor are very good, and might even be mistaken for something produced by a dedicated telephoto cam. Not the best telephoto cam ever put in a phone, but a decent one nonetheless. The processing applied to these shots is unsurprisingly very similar to what's done to 1x stills from the same 64MP sensor, which means we were overall pleased.

Daytime 2x zoom shots cropped from the main sensor

The dedicated macro cam may feel like a useless gimmick, but you're confusing it for the depth sensor that's on the back just so the company can claim this phone has four snappers over there. Anyway, quick rant aside, the macro camera enables some unique perspectives, as it allows you to get very, very close to your subjects. This creates very cool images of plants or insects, for example. Yes, it's a niche thing, but it's a nice niche thing, so we felt it deserved a mention, even if the photos themselves are at a severe resolution disadvantage - 2 MP is just not enough in this day and age.

Macro samples

At night, the main snapper produces decent images, but you can see it struggling, and the lack of OIS isn't helping. Not that we were expecting to get OIS from a phone this cheap, mind you. In the standard photo mode, the 64MP camera delivers mostly usable results, with good dynamic range, pleasant colors, and good contrast. The shots do appear rather soft, though, and noise can creep in.

Nighttime camera samples from the main sensor

Night Mode is subtle, as it always is on Xiaomi phones (and assorted sub-brands). If you look closely, though, you'll see that it captures more shadow detail, but doesn't really seem to restore clipped highlights all that well (or at all). The photos captured in this mode do tend to be sharper and more detailed than those taken in auto mode. As usual, going with Night Mode will ensure that you can't rapidly capture images one after the other - the gathering of info for Night Mode takes a few seconds in itself, then the processing is even longer after that.

Night Mode samples

Still, in some cases, when you have the required time, it might be better to use this at night compared to the standard mode because aside from the time per capture disadvantage, it doesn't seem to have any visible downsides. Just don't expect night-and-day differences between it and the auto mode, it really is quite subdued.

When the lights go down, the ultrawide camera becomes utterly useless, producing severely underexposed images full of noise, with bad contrast and dynamic range. Sometimes you can barely tell what you were trying to capture, so this is one shooter that really is pointless to use at night. It doesn't have a Night Mode, but that's probably just because the sensor is bad enough that software fixes wouldn't have produced much more usable snaps anyway.

Nighttime samples from the ultrawide

You can still capture 2x zoomed shots at night, and why wouldn't you - since the Redmi Note 8 Pro doesn't have a dedicated telephoto camera, but crops from the main sensor. Most flagships actually revert to something like this at night too. These images are noisy, and the detail levels are lacking, but the dynamic range is decent, contrast is good, and the colors are still okay. You won't win any awards for such shots, but this is useful to have as an option for those scenarios where you can't 'zoom with your feet'. You might need to capture a bunch of photos though until you get a usable one.

Nighttime 2x zoom samples

Selfies are great, especially considering the price of this phone. The photos are sharp, and HDR works very well to create a lot of dynamic range. For Portrait Mode the edge detection isn't perfect, but isn't very bad either - it's got to work with just one sensor so results are pretty much as expected.

Nighttime selfies understandably come out noisy and less detailed, but they are by no means unusable - at least, that is, if you stick to some marginal amount of ambient light. Of course, you won't print these and hang them on your wall (we hope), but for a quick share with your friends or a social media post, most are usable.

Selfies, day and night, portrait mode off/on

Overall, the Redmi Note 8 Pro's camera system is quite flexible, giving you options for ultrawide framing as well as macro shots, and even a faux 2x zoom of sorts. Quality-wise these aren't the greatest images we've ever seen, but for this price, the handset delivers very good snaps. Where it falls short is in very low light, but that's understandable thanks to the lack of OIS.

Issues

As this is a mid-range phone, we went in thinking we might see a few random issues here and there, and we did, but far less than we expected. Most of these are software things that can be fixed with updates, although the update situation itself is quite concerning - the Redmi Note 8 Pro definitely could use more of those.

The main problem with this device, which could turn into a dealbreaker for you, is that it doesn't support interband LTE carrier aggregation (CA) on all bands. If that sounds like a foreign language, let's try to unpack it. Services marketed as "4G+" and sometimes "LTE+" or "LTE-A" work to increase speeds by aggregating two or more carriers (not to be confused with "carriers" as in "mobile network operators"). Think of carriers as lanes on a highway. The more lanes, the more capacity, and actually the theoretical maximum throughput is additive - so if you have such a theoretical maximum of 150Mbps down on one carrier, and the same on another, if you aggregate the two you'll get a new theoretical maximum of 300Mbps.

This feature is very much operator dependent, but in our neck of the woods, the one we use aggregates LTE bands 3+7, and 3+7+20. Technically, the Redmi Note 8 Pro should support both, but it doesn't. In practice, this significantly lowers speeds. Testing revealed peak speeds of about 50Mbps, while another phone we had around, with the same SIM card, on the same operator, at the same time, managed 100+Mbps because it was doing CA. We're only talking about downloads here because very few operators worldwide use CA for uploads.

This is an issue we haven't seen in years, but it might just be because we haven't tested a lot of mid-rangers for long-term reviews. Still, if your carrier does use CA, this is concerning, because the Redmi Note 8 Pro might not be able to take advantage of that, thus giving you lower speeds than it could. And while you may think this is not an issue for you because you can live with 50Mbps, you shouldn't take that number as gospel. At peak usage times for the mobile network, we registered about 15-20Mbps on the Note 8 Pro, and 70+Mbps on a phone that is capable of aggregating these specific carriers. And we're using a network that's pretty dense, the lower the density of cells, the more the speeds take a hit when a lot of people are connected to the same cell.

So this is a case of a severe lack of present-proofing, to say nothing about the future. In a world that's starting to get 5G in some places, this phone can't even do 4G+. Now obviously, if your operator doesn't even have a 4G+ network (also called LTE+ or LTE-A sometimes), then you're fine. But if it does, this is something that we feel you need to keep in mind.

Next up, software stuff. First off, the DND mode simply doesn't work on the current version of MIUI 11. It straight-up doesn't silence notifications. We've played with the settings, we deleted our profile that was restored from the cloud and made a new one just to be sure, but no. DND is a no go, and this is a pretty important bug in this day and age. It's clearly an easy one to fix, so we're hoping future versions of MIUI 11 will take care of that - and also hopefully bring Android 10 to the Redmi Note 8 Pro too.

DND mode is present but doesn't work

The brightness slider likes to be funny sometimes, when you've set Auto brightness to On and want to manually adjust it. As in, it simply won't let you. This is a random occurrence, we've had it happen both in very bright environments and very dim ones, so there doesn't seem to be a logic to what triggers this bug. Out of probably a hundred or so manual adjustments we've made to the slider, this only happened around 10-12% of the time though, so it's nothing you can't live with. In fact, we grew to be quite amused by how it was seemingly 'fighting' us. Still, definitely something that needs fixing ASAP.

Finally, if you're using Bluetooth headphones to listen to music and find that pressing their dedicated buttons (or performing the dedicated gesture) for skipping tracks isn't working, then head over into Settings > Sound & Vibration > Headphones and audio effects and make sure you change the Headphone remote buttons option to Control music playback. You'll still be able to control volume with your headphones, we promise. Why does this need to exist, though? On every other Android skin headphone buttons simply do what they need to, no questions asked.

Headphones settings

Keep in mind that these issues might not occur in all units, even though we had them in ours. Bugs can be like that sometimes and not show their ugly faces everywhere. That's what makes some bugs harder to fix than others.