Honor Magic 7 Pro Camera Review: The Ultimate Camera Phone?

The new Honor Magic 7 Pro is here and wants to outshine the camera phone competition, combining the latest mobile hardware with a wealth of new AI-enhanced functionality.

One area where Honor’s paid particular attention is the phone’s upgraded ‘Falcon Camera System’, which features a revised telephoto sensor, paired with a new AI Super Zoom feature; allowing you to capture shots from further away than ever before. Portrait photography and action shots have also been injected with a dose of AI, along with the phone’s ever-improving image editing tools.

After testing the phone for the past month – using it on the beaches of England’s south coast and documenting my recent trip to the Slovenian Alps – I’ve come to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the Magic 7 Pro’s camera, and whether its new AI toolset helps Honor surpass the Xiaomi 14 Ultra as the best camera phone, or whether mobile photographers should consider alternatives.

If you’re already set on picking the Honor Magic 7 Pro, the phone is available to buy now, direct from Honor. Or you might want to read our full review first.

Camera hardware

The first thing I noticed when scrutinising the 7 Pro’s camera hardware was that it relies on a near-identical set of sensors to the previous Honor Magic 6 Pro.

That’s no bad thing, mind. With a large 1/1.3-inch lead 50Mp Omnivision sensor, supported by OIS (optical image stabilisation) and a dual ƒ/1.4 to ƒ/2.0 aperture, it can open wider than most of the other flagship phones on the market in the pursuit of less noise while capturing more light, especially in darker scenarios.

That comes supported by a 50Mp 1/2.88-inch ƒ/2.0 ultrawide, with a 122° field of view, and a brand new OIS-supported 200Mp 1/1.4-inch ƒ/2.6 telephoto sensor. Honor’s upped the ante compared to the 180Mp tele on the Magic 6 Pro, with its new flagship able to natively shoot at 3x magnification (up from 2.5x), with a lossless 6x sensor crop option too.

Another 50Mp sensor (1/2.93-inch f/2.0 90°) sits within the 7 Pro’s Dynamic Island-esq ‘Magic Capsule’, alongside a 3D ToF (time-of-flight) sensor, which means it serves double duty, as part of some of the most robust biometric 3D face unlocking on any Android phone today.

Camera features

While 6x optical zoom is great, Honor wanted to push the capabilities of its latest flagship, which is where the new AI Super Zoom feature comes in. While its predecessor could reach the same lofty levels of magnification, at up to 100x, resultant image quality was wholly dependent on the ability of the sensor, paired with the device’s ISP (image signal processor) and Honor’s on-device image processing.

AI Super Zoom steps in when capturing shots past 30x magnification and uses AI to effectively fill back in absent detail, employing the company’s own ‘telephoto enhancement large model’ to do so (basically Honor’s own AI data set, specifically tailored to telephoto photography).

One important note is that the feature requires an internet connection to function, as images have to be processed off-device. It’s also only available at capture, with no option to apply AI Super Zoom processing on telephoto shots from within Honor’s native Gallery app after the fact, which seems like a missed opportunity.

The Studio Harcourt partnership the company struck up for the launch of the Honor 200 Pro comes as part of the Magic 7 Pro’s shooting experience too; granting access to colour tuning modelled after the studio’s famed portraits. It’s paired with a tasteful bokeh effect when switching to the phone’s portrait mode, which is now supported across 1x, 2x, 3x and 6x zoom.

It’s a joy capturing telephoto shots on the Magic 7 Pro

This is then joined by the new AI Enhanced Portrait feature, which itself uses a dedicated on-device AI model (consisting of over one million light and shadow samples and 1.3 billion model parameters) to help sculpt shots of subjects, to produce better-looking results beyond the capabilities of the phone’s hardware and your shooting scenario.

The motion-sensing Action mode makes a return for fast-moving subjects (you can even have the phone snap a pic when it thinks is best, but I left this off), but the 7 Pro ups the ante with a new HD Super Burst feature that better freezes fast motion while running shots through the phone’s full ‘AI Honor image engine’, for higher quality results.

Telephoto samples

It’s a joy capturing telephoto shots on the Magic 7 Pro, with pleasant, marginally punched-up colours, respectable detail capture and solid HDR processing that doesn’t feel too heavy-handed.

The ability to shoot between 0.5x and 6x, knowing there’s no loss in optical quality gives you confidence in the phone’s ability to capture worthwhile shots, although zoom past that point and you have to start being more considerate of lighting conditions and focal length.

Between 6x and 30x you’re reliant on the phone’s standard imaging pipeline, which in good lighting conditions tends to deliver. As available light drops though, despite the large sensor size, the 7 Pro starts to struggle. In high-contrast settings (e.g. dark skies and bright streetlamps) light sources tend to blow out, while more muted low-light shooting results in a loss of colour depth and flatter, desaturated imagery.

AI Super Zoom can do a convincing job of reviving photos, but the further you zoom, the more the feature has to fill in the gaps, and the greater the likelihood of artificial or synthetic-looking results.

The more random geometry of natural subjects – tree branches, rock faces etc. – result in more convincing final images, as it’s harder to spot where Super Zoom is stepping in, while manmade structures with uniform shapes and adornments, and lots of parallel or perpendicular lines, better expose the feature’s improvisations.

At the highest zoom levels, some shots appear almost painterly, detached from the reality they’re meant to depict, as if they’ve been run through a Photoshop filter. In the same vein, as good as 100x zoom shots of the moon appear on the 7 Pro, they’re fabrications, distinctly uncharacteristically high fidelity, compared to anything else captured at the phone’s maximum focal length.

As good as 100x zoom shots of the moon appear on the 7 Pro, they’re fabrications

Portrait mode samples

The added flexibility of portrait mode across four dedicated focal lengths serves as a nice upgrade over the Magic 6 Pro, with the added Harcourt tuning offering more dynamic results than a simple black-and-white or vivid filter.

The phone defaults to the Harcourt Vibrant profile, which ups the contrast ever so slightly while also accentuating warmer tones. Harcourt Colour maintains that enhanced contrast, but levels out colour tones a little, resulting in a defined but softer composition overall. Harcourt Classic, meanwhile, takes things monochrome, with a relatively flat contrast curve, as if the subject is lit on their darker side, by a subtle fill light.

Across all of the Magic 7 Pro’s portrait shooting, bokeh quality is good as far as smartphones go, with the ability to dial the effect up or down at capture. Once again, it would have been nice to be able to alter the virtual f-stop in post, from the Gallery app, and the falloff does look a little abrupt, but it otherwise outpaces the likes of its most recently-released rival, OnePlus 13, in this regard.

As for the 7 Pro’s new AI Enhanced Portrait mode, the results are unquestionably better, it’s just, at first, tricky to establish what the phone’s built-in Portrait Large Model has done to an image. This makes it ideal for social platforms, as it’s more subtle than the AR makeup filters on the likes of Snapchat and TikTok, while also still leaving more original features intact.

Cropping in on the example shot above, the mode appears to reduce noise and smooth skin, but then add a sharpness layer to keep things looking crisp. There’s evidence of object removal (such as the lint on my eyebrow in the original image) and even subtle image generation (like the light reflecting in my pupil, which only appears in the AI-enhanced image).

Macro samples

The Honor Magic 7 Pro has an automatic macro mode that switches on when the phone detects you’re close to a subject, as near as 2.5cm. It uses the ultrawide lens, demanding an abundance of available light for the best results.

You can up the ante further, with a separate dedicated Super Macro mode which appears to reduce lens distortion. However, whichever method you use, expect a high-contrast result with more obvious post-capture sharpening than imagery taken from the phone’s main sensor. It’s, again, well suited to social media, but doesn’t translate to the authentic finish of shots captured using a camera with a dedicated macro lens attached, all that well.

Burst mode samples

Honor’s Action mode is a little overzealous, kicking on at the hint of motion in-frame, even if all that usually was, was me raising the phone to take a picture. That minor annoyance aside, however, it’s a worthwhile part of the 7 Pro’s shooting experience that cordons off zoom past 10x to increase the chances of you nabbing a usable shot.

HD Super Burst then steps in (above, right) to provide the sharpest imagery possible, while trying to maintain consistency with the phone’s native photographic look at a rate of up to 10fps. Like Action mode, Honor should provide a toggle, so you have the option for HD Super Burst mode to engage automatically when you hit the shutter, but that’ll likely come in a future release of MagicOS, once it’s seen as a more core part of the camera experience.

There’s a clear difference in motion and sharpness between normal burst capture and HD Super Burst images, with the colour capture proving pretty consistent, while by comparison, white balance appeared to wobble; depending on the fast-moving subject I was shooting.

General and low-light samples

Beyond the bombastic telephoto and the headline-grabbing AI-led features, the Honor Magic 7 Pro is a generally solid camera phone.

With enough light, HDR processing doesn’t eliminate dark areas of the frame, and yet there’s still shadow detail. Colours are pleasing too, with a slight boost in saturation and consistent white balance, all based on the phone’s out-of-box ‘vibrant’ shooting profile.

When a scene is particularly bright, the phone does run the risk of over-exposing just a tad, although you can rescue such shots by tapping and dragging down on the pop-up exposure slider within the viewfinder, rather than having to have to resort to full manual control.

There’s clearly a little trickery at play, with the phone’s five-bladed aperture miraculously producing 18-point star bursts, when aimed at point light sources, like ceiling lights or the sun, but that’s not out of character, considering the other image manipulation the 7 Pro is more upfront about.

Beyond the bombastic telephoto and the headline-grabbing AI-led features, the Honor Magic 7 Pro is a generally solid camera phone

Where the camera system most obviously suffers is low light. Colours lose saturation and even when viewing shots in the phone’s native Gallery app, there’s distinct colour banding, suggesting Honor’s image processing pipeline is working overtime, and crushing swathes of gradiated colour – as in the shot with an evening coastal sky – in order to work with the light available to it.

It’s also the only high-end phone in recent memory that I’ve tested that demands the use of the dedicated Night mode. In most cases, if you’re shooting in a scenario that’s too dim for the phone’s standard photo mode, the phone will simply extend the shutter time to capture more light and tell you it’s doing so.

With the Honor Magic 7 Pro, while shutter is still extended in much the same way, the results from Night mode are head and shoulders above what can be captured from the camera app’s native Photo mode. An odd quirk that forces additional user interaction in order to get the best shot; a trait at odds with the rest of the camera’s feature set.

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