The Honor 8 Pro got launched for the price of Rs. 29999 and for that, the quick run of specifications show a 5.7-inch 2K display, an octa-core Kirin 960 chipset, a 4000 mAh battery, and the highlight of the device is still its dual-lens camera combination. To be fair, benchmarks always are just about numbers and the real test happens when you use the smartphone in real life, in several conditions.
Here, the Honor 8 Pro has a camera setup similar to what is offered on the Honor 8 and Huawei P9, which means you will see two cameras, one with an RGB sensor and the other with a monochrome one. While technically both the sensors are the same, but the Bayer filter that gives the color information is removed from the secondary sensor and thus, it can take it only the blacks and whites. Now, the advantage of having that is the detail that it can take. The RGB sensor takes in the colors accurately and then the monochrome sensor records the details in the frame, and the software helps merge the two in real time to save the picture without spending any time.
How good is that on the Honor 8 Pro?
To begin with, let’s talk about the camera app. The app offers a lot right from its default screen. There are options to toggle between the front and back cameras, activate beautification, activate Wide aperture mode, and toggle the flash. Swiping from left to right on the screen gives you a plethora of options that define the possibilities of the camera of the device.
Following are the modes available in the list.
- Photo
- Pro Photo
- Video
- Pro Video
- Monochrome
- HDR
- 3D Creator
- Night Shot
- Panorama
- Light Painting
- Time Lapse
- Slow Mo
- Filter
- Watermark
- Audio Note
- Document Scan
And you can install a “Good Food” mode if you are one of those who shoot a lot of pictures of what you eat.
Monochrome magic – It isn’t a mere software enhancement
The secondary sensors on the camera is the monochrome one and while it can capture all the details well, the other advantage is that it is the one responsible for making pictures brighter by letting more light into the sensor. This also results in minimizing of the noise in the capture.
The actual captures – Where the two cameras work together
The dynamic range to start with, is very good when you take normal captures without any mode activated. The best part about the camera is that it brings out colors that are almost true to the real life ones and though they might seem a bit overly done on the phone’s display, the quality can be well judged on a larger screen such as on a laptop or TV. There is no over-saturation done and even the HDR mode handles it well.
When you check the source code of the pictures, you will find some of the pictures getting the hdr tag automatically even when there is no HDR mode activated, which says that the app by itself decides if a certain picture needs that enhancement to the colors or dynamic range.
Even when the conditions didn’t seem very stable, the EIS in the camera worked its best in bringing out non-shaky photos but that wouldn’t always be the case during 4K video recording. The other modes included are anyway an added advantage here but the overall quality of the Honor 8 Pro is superb.
The wide aperture mode – Make it blur!
One of the advantages of having the dual-lens camera setup is that you can take wide-aperture shots where one camera works on capturing the details of the object in focus while the other camera records the information of depth, understanding how far are the things in the background so that a blur can be set for the non-focused background and foreground. One of the other advantages of the same on Honor 8 Pro is that you can set the aperture size / F-stop and that can be done even after the picture is captured.
The below samples are randomly selected from the lot that we captured and the thing to notice here is the borders of the object which makes the portraits so perfect and not look completely artificial with that blur.
While these above samples do a lot of justice to what we claim, the things don’t end here because the modes available in the app are capable of helping you in experimenting and do some great capturing with the camera. The modes like light painting, 3D creator, and Night shot do what the name suggest and the manual mode is a perfect one with some important controls given to the user to handle and change the way some elements are set. That includes the ISO, Exposure, White Balance, Focus, and Shutter speed.
The overall experience with the camera remains so great and there’s no exaggeration in claiming that this is the best set of camera you would find in this price range and the camera is capable of competing with the ones on the higher-priced flagships as well, though you will have to magnify in to see how much it differs from the offering on Huawei P9 and Honor 8.
The Honor 8 Pro is exclusively available on Amazon India – Check the details.
awesome cameras and amazing specs at an amazing price tag, the true flagship killer of 2017!!
I love this phone. But no optical image stabilization. That’s bad news for me. It has everything else!