With almost all the smartphones looking the same, and offering similar kind of specifications, it has increasingly becoming difficult for manufacturers to differentiate themselves. Some do it on the basis of price, some do it on the aspects such as camera, which is among the top use-cases for mobile devices. But there are some brands like Huawei’s offshoot Honor, which plays on both factors.
The recently-launched Honor 8 is a testament to that fact. Priced at Rs 29,999, it offers everything you could ask from a flagship. Right from its 5.5-inch full HD display to its octa-core process, the phone is quite powerful. For memory, it features 4GB RAM and 32GB flash storage for storing your files. It looks premium with its glass body, and promises to last long with its 3,000mAh battery.
But the camera (or rather cameras) are what deserves a special mention in case of the Honor 8. Yes, there are not one, but two cameras on the back of the smartphone. What’s even more interesting is that the cameras are essentially the same on Huawei’s high-end offering, the P9 – two 12-megapixel sensors. Both of them sport an aperture of f/2.2 along with having a sensor size of 1.25µm, letting more light to enter. The use of two cameras help in capturing better images, since one of them captures the colour information (RGB), while the other shoots the grayscale image. Then, the software combines them together to form one image that has impressive colours and sharp details.
The camera interface on the Honor 8 also deserves a mention, because of the sheer features it offers. You can enable various modes, depending upon your need or the situation. These include usual ones such as HDR, panorama, beauty, etc., along with the interesting ones such as pro mode, light painting, and more. We’d like to highlight the pro mode, as it gives you the control of different settings like ISO, shutter speed, etc. Light painting is also interesting as it offers pictures similar to DSLR by capturing light trails.
Talking about the image quality, we’d simply say that they are among the best we’ve seen on a smartphone this year. Be it details, colours, or saturation, everything is top notch. The Honor 8 does complete justice to all the scenes – nature, close ups and even in the low-light. We also liked the HDR mode, which is really powerful. The night mode helps you capture better images in poor lighting, and you can also use the LED flash to get more light. If you’re capturing the picture of food, then you can make use of the good food mode.
Here are some of the images taken from the Honor 8 to give idea of its camera capabilities.
Another mode which we haven’t mentioned above is depth of field. Thanks to the availability of two cameras, the Honor 8 has a dedicated mode which gives you the ability to focus on the subject and have a beautiful bokeh effect around it. This mode gives you impressive results, something that was only possible with DSLRs till now. Here are some of the clicks in this mode.
Overall, the Honor 8 isn’t only a powerful smartphone based on its specs, it can also be counted among the top camera phones launched this year, which is an impressive feat.
