Honor Magic 7 Pro Review – I wanted to love it, but didn’t

The Honor Magic 7 Pro is Honor’s flagship smartphone, with a range of impressive cameras on the back, it offers the best of what Honor can offer. I test it to find out how it performs in a variety of shooting scenarios. All cameras have auto-focus, including the selfie camera, and the telephoto camera offers a 200MP sensor, even more impressive is the 2-step aperture on the main camera, with f/1.4-2.0 available, and a 1/1.3inch sensor. 

At a glance

• 50MP f/1.4-2.0 main camera, 23mm equivalent, OIS 
• 200MP f/2.6 telephoto, 69mm equivalent, OIS (3x optical) 
• 50MP f/2.0 ultra-wide, 12mm equivalent, PDAF 
• 50MP f/2.0 selfie camera, with AF (22mm equiv) 
• 4K 60/30fps front/rear video recording 
• 6.8inch 1600nit (5000nits peak), HDR, 120Hz 
• 5270mAh (China: 5850mAh) Carbon Silicon, 100W wired / 80W wireless charging 
• Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite processor, 12/16GB RAM / 256/512GB/1TB storage options 
• IPX68/69 water resistant 
• Dimensions 162.7 x 77.1 x 8.8mm  
• 223g weight 

Features

Honor, once the budget arm of Huawei, now free from the shackles of having to live under the shadow of Huawei, have been making flagship level phones for several years now. And with none of the restrictions imposed onto Huawei, Honor phones have full access to Google Play and other Google features including Gemini AI.

However, unlike Oppo/OnePlus and their ties with Hasseblad (Vivo with Zeiss), Honor don’t have a camera brand to partner up with, so have to stand on their own two feet when it comes to developing and delivering high quality camera systems. Luckily Honor have partnered with Qualcomm and Google for a number of features, and on the Magic7 Pro they offer a quad camera setup (if you include the selfie camera), with all units featuring auto-focus.

All three camera on the back offer something a little bit interesting, with even the ultra-wide angle offering auto-focus (allowing for macro), the main camera has a relatively large 1/1.3inch sensor (and OIS), as well as a variable aperture (with f/1.4-2.0 selectable), and the telephoto camera offers an exceedingly generous 200MP 1/1.4inch sensor, again with AF and OIS. This allows for telephoto close-ups as well as enhanced telephoto zoom beyond the optical 3x telephoto lens, with 6x zoom being lossless.

The selfie camera, a 50MP unit, offers auto-focus, something some flagship phones (from some brands) neglect to provide.

With all this, we begin to feel like Honor are really throwing everything they can at the phone, to make it stand out from the crowd. It makes companies like Samsung, Apple, and Google seem tame and somewhat boring in what they are offering, with the lack of telephoto close-ups becoming all the more galling as time goes on.

Handling and design

The Honor Magic7 Pro offers a stylish design, with the usual slab like front, with a double hole punch in the screen for the selfie camera. The rear is more impressive looking with a large circle containing the main rear cameras.

Build quality is second-to-none, but with numerous brands, like OnePlus, Vivo, Xiaomi, and Honor all using a circle for the rear camera unit, I do wonder if the design is likely to get lumped in with other Android phones. Perhaps Google’s most controversial decisions in phone design, the camera bar, was in fact one of it’s best decisions, as the Google Pixel series of phones are immediately recognisable.

As mentioned build quality is very good, however, one thing that might cause some issues, is the extremely reflective chrome edges along the sides and surrounding the circular camera module. This won’t be an issue for most people, but if you record in situations where you don’t want the camera to be reflected in shots or video, then this could be frustrating. There’s a reason why video cameras are black, for example, people don’t want the camera to be reflected back at them in glass surfaces like glasses, screens, and windows etc.

High build quality continues with the impressive sounding stereo speakers built-in, which are loud, as well as having a seriously impressive amount of bass for a smartphone. It certainly puts many other flagship phones to shame.

The phone uses a silicon carbon battery which is the latest type of battery technology, allowing for more power in a smaller space. This gives the phone a 5270mAh battery rating (for the global version), with the 5800mAh rating for the China model, there’s also high-speed 100W charging, as well as 80W wireless charging, with support for reverse wireless charging. Samsung, Apple, and Google, again looking like they have some serious catching up to do. In the box there is no wall charger, but there is a USB Type-C cable (Type A to Type C).

Honor say you’ll also get 4 years of OS updates, and 5 years of security updates. For a flagship phone, it would be nice to see Honor matching Samsung and Google, who both offer 7 years.

The camera app…

The camera app is the usual easy to understand interface, with all the usual controls in all the usual places. If you’ve used one Android phone, you’ve pretty much used them all, none of them really offer anything different these days in terms of the layout of controls, for fear of breaking the mould, or being ostracised like Sony’s camera phone apps which tried to force an interface from a real camera onto a phone with unsurprisingly awful results.

You can very quickly open the photo app by double-pressing the power button. Taking photos is quick, however, the HDR effect isn’t shown while you take the photo, which has meant I often have to check the photo in playback, wait a short while and then see what the result is like in terms of colour and dynamic range. It would be nice to see this updated in future and become a real-time view while taking the photo.

The on-screen shutter button is at the bottom, as you have quick access to the main photo (and video) modes, with additional modes accessible in the more section. The main modes includes are Night, Portrait, Photo, Video, Pro, and more. The Pro mode lets you manually switch between f/1.4 and f/2.0, as well as other settings, and in other modes, the camera will automatically select the aperture as needed.

The different camera ‘lenses’ are available near the bottom with options for 0.5x, 1x, 2x, 3x, and 6x. There’s also quick access to the different colour modes (Natural, Vibrant, Authentic) on the right, quick access to burst mode (on the left), and a quick swipe up brings up additional settings.

The additional shooting modes include aperture (software based), movie, slow-mo, panorama, light painting, time-lapse, watermark, super macro, high-res, multi-video, night video, stage, scan document and story.

Some of the standout photography features include long exposure photography, letting you take light trail and waterfall photos handheld, as well as a new “Stage” (light) mode that lets you capture the darker atmosphere of scenes, without the camera overexposing or creating HDR style images.

The editing features…

The editing app feels a little bit fussy, with lots of different options and controls, and this doesn’t seem as immediate or easy to use as other phones. There also seems to be a slight delay while the phone processes your changes which feels odd when you’re used to immediate changes. I expect with time, the interface will be something you quickly get used to.

AI editing features include “AI eraser” which works in mysterious ways, replacing something you want to erase with something AI generated. This clearly could do with a lot more work to match the simplicity of Photoshop’s content-aware erase tool. You results may vary, but it seems to have a long was to go to match Google’s Magic Eraser as well.

Performance

The main camera gives some impressive results, which are difficult to fault, with a good amount of detail. I was pleasantly surprised to find that with the sun in the frame, the camera produced some nice looking sun-stars. Low light performance is also good, but lens flare can be an issue at times with a bright light source in the frame, such as a street light.

The ‘Natural’, ‘Vibrant’ and ‘Authentic’ colour modes give your images a different look, with the “Authentic” giving the most heavily saturated images, with an added vignette, so the style doesn’t really match the name, which is a bit odd. But it can give images a more dramatic look, and perhaps should be renamed to dramatic. It’d be nice if the vignette could be switched off, as you might want the vibrant colours, but without the vignette (darkened corners).

Ultra-wide camera…

The ultra-wide angle camera gives good results, with colours matching the main camera, and when viewed on screen or at smaller sizes there’s little to complain about. However, if you go pixel-peeping, you’ll be able to see purple fringing into the corners of the frame.

The telephoto camera and AI Super Zoom

On paper, this sounds amazing, (you know where this is going), a whopping 200MP camera sensor that’s larger than normal at 1/1.4inch, pixel-binned images down to 12MP, and a relatively bright aperture of f/2.6, with autofocus, and optical image stabilisation (OIS). So we were expecting to see images with amazing levels of detail and clarity, and nice colours that match the main cameras, and whilst images were reasonable, there were some issues, which I’ll detail below.

What we got, was generally soft images, lacking in detail, and colours that were often drastically different to the colours from the other cameras on the phone. If you don’t spend too much time pixel-peeping, then you should be happy with the level of detail captured, but if (and when) you notice the colour shifts, this can be a really annoying issue.

We’re hopeful that updates can resolve this, but this is not a good start, as the camera has to use this camera as a basis for the 6x, 10x and more optical zoom. Using the 6x zoom you get reasonable results, but nothing particularly impressive, and at 10x or more you often get soft mushy images.

Moving over to the digital and AI Super Zoom, with ‘Motion Sensing Capture Detection’ enabled the most you can zoom is 10x. Then if you go beyond a certain zoom point (30x onwards) you get the option of using AI Super Zoom, if you have a working internet connection, which you can switch on. This is where your images can get much more crisp and detailed, but the results are generated by AI, and can be good enough, with the results looking good on the screen.

However, if you zoom in and view the detail, things can look a little weird, so don’t do that, and you’ll be pleased with the results. I didn’t get any results that were too weird, but other people who tried it got some odd results. In playback you can see the new AI generated image side-by-side with the original, and this is where you can see things like an extra row of windows in buildings, and other additions, or in a number of areas clear detail is actually being removed from parts of the image.

If you use too much zoom, like 80-100x, a lot of the time you would take photos, go to playback, get an enhanced image, along with a message saying “AI enhancement not possible with this image”.

Macro performance

When taking photos of things close-up, the camera will automatically switch on the macro mode and switch to the ultra-wide-angle camera. As this has auto-focus it can focus on close subject, but you tend to get a distorted view. Where possible using the telephoto camera can give you better results, as long as it’s the right distance from the camera. An exam

Selfie camera…

We got some pleasing results from the selfie camera, which includes auto-focus, and a high-resolution 50MP sensor, that gives pixel binned 12MP images. Flare can be an issue if you place the sun directly in the frame, but simply reframe the shot and the problem is gone.

Video – One area where the phone doesn’t match some flagship rivals is in the lack of 8K video recording. However, for most people this isn’t going to be too important. Heck, many people run successful YouTube channels with just FullHD resolution video. So the lack of 8K video recording is unlikely to be a deal breaker for most people.

Value for money

£1099 (€1299) may sound like a lot, but with 512GB storage it actually compares quite well, especially as you need to spend more to upgrade to the 512GB versions of flagship phones from Google, Samsung, and Apple. Unfortunately the phone isn’t available in the US. Alternatives include the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra, Google Pixel 9 Pro, and iPhone 16 Pro.

Verdict

If you’re in the market for a smartphone with the latest camera tech, and the latest AI features, as well as (currently) the fastest Qualcomm processor ever made, which runs at a whopping 4.3GHz, then the Honor Magic7 Pro ticks a LOT of boxes, and you can get a lot of very good results from the cameras on the phone.

However, if you want a perfect phone, this is not it. Which is a real shame, as I’m a big fan of using telephoto cameras on phones, but I’m left wishing this one was better. I’m hopeful that software updates can fix some of the softness and colour issues I experienced with the telephoto camera on the phone.

The design of the phone is generally quite pleasing to look at, perhaps lacking the pizazz of some phones, with a lot of effort being put into the circle camera unit, which Honor say is the perfect blend of a circle and a square, if such a thing is possible.

However, it’s the shiny chrome finish around the camera lens that is a huge issue when you’re taking photos of anything reflective, such as through glass, as these will end up being captured in your photos on bright sunny days, and if you’re using the phone for video work, then you’ll probably want to cover this in a completely black case.

There’s a lot to like about the new phone, and the camera performance, however, there are a few little things that stop it scoring higher. Namely inconsistent results when switching between the main camera and telephoto camera, which makes it feel like Honor haven’t quite got complete control over the colour output on this phone. Perhaps this will be resolved in future phone updates. I was also a little underwhelmed by the telephoto camera performance in terms of detail, with images looking overly smoothed at times (to reduce noise).

If you’re a photographer who rarely uses the telephoto camera on a phone, then this might not be too much of an issue, but if you’re someone who uses it a lot, and switches between the different cameras a lot, then this could be a frustrating phone to use. In addition the AI Super Zoom seems like it still needs work. With so many flagship camera phones, there’s no room for any mistakes.

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