u/Azuki900

Follow-up to my iPhone 16 Pro Max and Xiaomi 14 Ultra RAW test.

After testing more scenes, my opinion has not really changed:

Xiaomi has the hardware edge, but the real-world image quality gap is smaller than people think.

The Xiaomi 14 Ultra deserves credit. The 1-inch type LYT-900 sensor, Leica tuning, variable aperture, floating telephoto macro, and stronger secondary cameras are all impressive. But that does not automatically mean the iPhone takes bad photos.

When both phones are shot in Bayer RAW, the files are much closer than the spec sheets suggest. Even in higher ISO crops, the noise pattern, detail, sharpness, and overall image structure are surprisingly similar. Xiaomi can have a slight advantage in optics, finer grain, or light gathering, but it is not a night-and-day difference.

And once you edit the RAW files, the gap gets even smaller. In some cases, a small exposure or white balance adjustment is enough to make both images land in nearly the same place.

That is my main point:

Most people are not reacting to a massive raw image-quality difference. They are reacting to processing.

Apple and Xiaomi simply process images differently. Different HDR, sharpening, color science, contrast, saturation, and noise reduction. RAW strips most of that away and shows that the base image quality is closer than people want to admit.

Xiaomi has real advantages. But the iPhone is not suddenly bad just because it does not have the flashiest camera hardware.

I'll never understand why they dropped things like the Variable aperture, and the floating telephoto macro. They knocked it out of the park with those niche but fun features and it feels like its a step back.

I shot both an iPhone 16 Pro Max and a Xiaomi 14 Ultra in Bayer RAW and applied the same edit/preset to both.

Once you remove each phone’s processing (HDR, sharpening, color science), the images come out nearly identical. The “gap” people talk about is much smaller than it seems.

This doesn’t mean specs don’t matter, Xiaomi’s 1-inch sensor, variable aperture, and Leica tuning are genuinely impressive and give it advantages in certain scenarios. But it also doesn’t mean iPhone is suddenly “bad” because it doesn’t have those features.

What this really shows is that modern flagship cameras are already very close in raw capability. At that point, most of the differences people notice come from processing, not the actual image data. Even older devices like the iPhone 11, when shooting in Bayer RAW, can produce a surprisingly similar look in good lighting, comparable sharpness, similar noise levels, and very usable image data once edited.

Obviously newer phones have real advantages (better dynamic range, improved low light, better lenses, etc.), but it shows how far even older sensors had already come.