Honor 70 Review | Photography Blog

Introduction

Ease of Use

With its new 6.67-inch OLED screen, the Honor 70 is on the large side for a smartphone, but still fits comfortably enough in one hand, and it’s not quite as big as a device like the Samsung S22 Ultra, which has an even larger 6.8-inch screen.

We’ve been using the “Emerald Green” colourway with 256Gb of storage for this Honor 70 review, which is the flashiest of the three different colourways that are currently available – there’s also the more understated Midnight Black and Crystal Silver.

The display takes up virtually all of the screen, with just a small circular cut-out in the top-centre for the selfie camera. As such there’s no “notch” in the traditional sense, but there is always a small amount of display that’s permanently reserved for the phone settings when viewing anything in full screen mode.

Launching the native camera app requires a simple swipe up from the bottom right hand corner of the lock screen. Anyone who has used a Honor or Huawei phone before will already know that the native camera app is very well-featured, giving you lots of shooting modes to experiment with, so there’s no need to install a third-party app to take advantage of everything that it has to offer.

By default, the camera app launches in the standard “Photo” mode, but you can swipe right or left to choose different shooting modes. To the left you’ll find “Portrait”, “Night”,and “Aperture”, and to the right you’ll find “Video”, “Multi-Video”, and “More”. We’ll go through most of these in more depth as the review continues.

The Honor 70’s default Photo mode is probably what you’ll use for the majority of your shots. On the screen you’ll see the zoom options, which range from Wide (ultra wide camera) to a 2x optical zoom option. In between you have the 1x (standard camera) option.

Although it’s not immediately apparent, you can also digitally zoom in up to 10x. Levels of zoom in between 2x and 10x are created by a combination of optical and digital zoom using artificial intelligence. You can pinch in and out to zoom at different focal lengths, or run your finger up and down the slider.

At the top of the screen there are a few options to take note of. The first icon is to switch on the self-explanatory QR code scanner.

The second icon is to switch off or on artificial intelligence. If you have it switched on, the Honor 70 will alter its settings to best match the scene in front of it – the display will show what it thinks it has detected (for example, dogs, flowers) so you can be sure the right settings are likely to be applied.

The next icon is a flash icon, which you can switch to off, on, automatic or “always on”. Next is an icon for choosing between various digital filters, and finally, there’s a settings icon where you can make more in-depth changes, such as to aspect ratio, switching on audio control and selecting the video resolution.

You can tap around the Honor 70’s screen to select the focus point you want to use, and when you’re ready to take a shot you can either use the virtual shutter release button, or usefully the physical volume up and down keys on the side of the phone.

Portrait mode is something you can use with human subjects to create a shallow depth of field effect by enabling the Bokeh option and/or to apply a Beauty filter, with a scale running from 0-10.

If you want to create shallow depth of field effects with non-human subjects, that’s where the Honor 70’s Aperture mode comes into play. With that, you can photograph whatever you like, while also setting the aperture effect to between f/0.95 and f/16. An advantage of this mode is that you can make adjustments after the fact by tweaking the aperture settings in playback.

Night mode is something we’ve seen on a few different iterations of Honor and Huawei phones now, and as the name suggests, it’s something you use after dark. It essentially works by merging together a series of short exposures to create the effect of a long exposure.

You can only use it in completely automatic mode, though – you can’t adjust the ISO and the shutter speed. It merges all the images together automatically very quickly, and best of all, the images can be taken handheld and without the need of a tripod.

Video mode is pretty self-explanatory, with up to 4K resolution available and a fastest frame rate of 30fps. There’s also a 1080/60p mode that’s enabled by default.

Multi-video is a relatively new mode that made its debut on the previous Honor 50 model. It splits the screen into two and uses two different cameras at the same time to provide two different viewpoints within a single video. You can choose from Front/Rear, Rear/Rear, Picture in Picture, Rear and Front options.

The first one is probably most useful as it allows you to film a subject and talk to camera about it at the same time, whilst Rear/Rear employs the wide-angle and standard lenses at the same time, with the latter providing up to 5x zoom, so you can film an ultra-wide and close-up view of the subject simultaneously.

In the More sub-menu, Pro mode is interesting and something that enthusiasts will likely be very interested in. With this mode you can make changes to the metering mode, ISO speed (100-12800), shutter speed (1/6400-30sec), exposure compensation, AF mode and white balance.

You can now also record images in JPEG format only or and in Raw format (DNG), something that was notably absent on the previous model. Note that when shooting Raw a JPEG version is also recorded at the same time (you can’t turn this off).

The Super-macro mode enables you to focus on a subject that is just 4cms away from the Honor 70 and there is now auto-focusing available in this mode, another big improvement on the Honor 50.

The High-res mode produces a much higher-resolution image – 8768×6144 pixels to be exact – which is over 2x bigger than the default 12 megapixel 4096×3072 pixel images that the Honor 70 records.

The Slo-mo option records either a 1080/120p 4x or a 720/240p 8x slow-motion movie, while the new industry-first Solo Cut video mode simultaneously records both a wide angle 1080p video and a second 1080p video in portrait mode that can track a subject as they move around the frame.

The other options available in the More menu are Panorama, HDR, Time-Lapse, Stickers, Documents and Story.

Image Quality

We have long been impressed by the image quality of Honor and Huawei devices, and the Honor 70 is no different thanks to its use of the brand new Sony IMX800, a 54 megapixel sensor with a 1/1.49in size and 1-micron pixels.

In good light, colours from the main 54 megapixel f/1.9 aperture camera are bright, vibrant and punchy with a satisfying amount of detail in the resulting 12 megapixel pixel-binned images.

The 50 megapixel f/2.2 aperture ultra-wide-angle lens displays surprisingly little distortion and is particularly useful for architecture and landscape shots. It also doubles up as the super-macro lens, allowing the Honor 70 to focus as close as a mere 2.5cms away from your subject.

On the whole, exposures from the Honor 70 are well-balanced, with the AI setting in the “Photo” mode doing a good job of selecting the correct settings for the situation.

We believe that most people will be more than happy to use the Photo mode for the majority of their shots, only heading to one of the other modes – such as Pro – in certain scenarios.

The quality from the 10x digital zoom is acceptable for online purposes, but we wouldn’t recommend using it too often if you can avoid it – try and stick to the 1-2x optical zoom if you can.

In low light, the very impressive Night Mode comes into play to deliver excellent hand-held shots even when very little light is present.

The Aperture and Portrait modes are great for creating shallow depth of field effects. They do a good job of simulating the type of shot you could expect to achieve with a “real” camera, especially if you don’t examine the images too closely and are only sharing them at relatively small sizes online.

Focal Range

Wide

1x

2x

Macro

Bokeh / Aperture Mode

Focus on background

Focus on foreground

Aperture Mode – f/0.95

Filters

None

Classic

Dawn

Pure

Mono

Metallic

Blue

Cool

Caramel

Soft

Valencia

Night Mode

Off

On

Flash

Flash Off

Flash On

Flash Always On

HDR Mode

Off

On

High-Res Mode

Off

On

Off

On

Panorama

Sample Images

This is a selection of sample images from the Honor 70 camera, which were all taken using the 54 megapixel JPEG setting. The thumbnails below link to the full-sized versions, which have not been altered in any way.

Sample Movies & Video

Product Images

Conclusion

The new Honor 70 is a more rounded and more capable version of last year’s Honor 50 model, resulting in an appealing smartphone that more than out-performs its mid-range price-tag.

It may lack some premium features like wireless charging, stereo sound, a telephoto camera module and any level of waterproofing, but otherwise it’s a very stylish device that offers photographers and videographers a surprisingly rich feature-set backed-up by good image quality.

Honor have wisely left the user interface well alone, which is uncannily similar to the previous 50 version and to previous Huawei phones that we’ve reviewed, like the P20, 30 and 40 Pro series.

The native camera app continues to be very well functioned and user-friendly too – there’s definitely no need to install a third-party camera app on this device.

This includes the excellent Night Mode that we’ve previously enjoyed using on the Huawei P-series devices and the Aperture mode with its bokeh-producing f/0.95 setting.

Thankfully Honor have seen fit to address several of the complaints that we made about the previous version, including supporting full resolution images in both the Aperture and Macro modes (previously limited to 2 megapixels) which greatly increases their versatility and newly added support for the RAW file format.

With the Pro mode providing more granular control over what the Honor 70’s camera is actually doing, there’s a lot to like here for more experienced photographers who want more creative control than what your typical smartphone usually offers.

The standard 54mp camera module and the 50 megapixel wide-angle/macro module are both actually pixel-binned to produce 12 megapixel images which for the most part look appealing, while 4K/30p video is a fairly standard offering for mid-range devices such as this one.

Honor have at least innovated somewhat with the Multi-Video and brand new Solo-cut video modes, which genuinely offer something different to the mainstream norm.

The actual device itself is just on the right size of large without being ridiculously massive, offers day-long battery life, features a great 120Hz OLED screen and snappy performance, and looks more premium that its price-tag suggests thanks to the wrap-around screen and rounded corners.

Thankfully, this latest Honor device continues to offer Google’s Play Store, a legal omission that pretty much blighted the commercial appeal of all Huawei branded models.

Overall, the Honor 70 is a relatively affordable yet stylish and capable smartphone that has more to offer photographers and videographers than last year’s version.

Main Rivals

Listed below are some of the rivals of the Honor 70.

Review Roundup

Reviews of the Honor 70 from around the web.

Specifications

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