Honor has introduced an Ultimate edition of its Magic 4 smartphone that was announced at Mobile World Congress 2022 earlier this year, and it seems like the company put in everything it could find in terms of the optics.
The Honor Magic 4 Ultimate sports a quad rear camera setup that is led by a 50-megapixel wide camera with a customized 8P lens. It is joined by a 64MP ultrawide-angle sensor, a 64MP periscope telephoto lens, and a 50MP spectrum enhanced camera. Finally, there’s a brand-new, custom-made image processor.
The 1/1.12-inch sensor primary sensor has an aperture of f/1.6 that is said to rival cameras with a 1-inch sensor and f/1.8 aperture in terms of the capacity of light it lets in. As a result, night shots or lowlight portraits are brighter, with more vivid colors, better-defined objects, and minimal visual artifacts.
The customized 8P lens comes with a 37% improvement in center sharpness and a 30% improvement in edge sharpness, which helps it produce photos and videos that look detailed even when zoomed in. With this and a 64MP periscope camera, it is a serious challenger to the mighty Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra, which is currently the best smartphone camera for zoomed-in shots. It comes with 3.5x optical zoom and up to 100x digital zoom.
The primary 50MP camera also has an Ultra Anti-Reflection (UAR) coating and Infra-Red Cutoff Filter (IRCF) that lets it effectively minimize the flare from strong light sources — a problem that we’ve seen on the flagship iPhone and Samsung Galaxy devices. The 64MP ultrawide-angle lens offers a 126-degree field of view with the help of the world’s first Dual Free-Form Lens, which keeps the edge distortion to an industry-low 0.5%.
All of the above is achieved with the help of a new custom-made image processor that supports faster and more efficient A.I. computations to take better shots even in challenging lighting conditions. You can record 4K in night mode on this Ultimate smartphone. It also has an all-new professional-grade video format: Magic-Log2 that enables the capturing of 15% higher dynamic range for recording video footage.
The Honor Magic 4 Ultimate features a 6.81-inch LTPO OLED display with support for a 120Hz refresh rate. Like the Honor Magic 4 Pro, the Ultimate is powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 system on a chip. It comes with MagicUI 6.0 based on Android 12, complete with Google Play services and all the usual Google apps installed.
The Honor Magic 4 Ultimate is going on sale in China later this year for 7,999 Chinese Yuan, which translates to about $1,260. All told, that’s not too bad a price considering the potential camera capabilities. Of course, we’ll wait until we have the device in hand to judge the final product.
