Honor 8 Lite Review – Huawei’s lower mid-range getting better

Huawei-Honor-8

12 Megapixel Camera

Honor 8 Lite – Camera Review

First thing first, in a lot of Huwei’s intention into dual-camera configuration, Honor 8 Lite is out of that question. It equips with a standard single camera module on the back and another on the front – 12 megapixels and 8 megapixels respectively.

12 Megapixels Rear Camera

The primary 12MP rear camera is just standard autofocus camera that even Huawei has nothing to tell about that. In technical terms, the camera sensor has 1.252μm size of pixels inside and f/2.2 aperture lens on the outside. The camera has phase detection autofocus (PDAF) for faster focusing speed – which in official numbers is just 0.3 seconds.

“Shooting modes include: slow-shutter mode, watermark mode, audio photos, image correction, food mode and many more. PDAF also applied to video shooting, combined with new video editing function paired with multiple modes. With Honor 8 lite you can create your own mini-movies.

Honor 8 Lite Camera UI

Along the camera, there is a single LED flash – that is dual-tone in technical terms, to maintain well balanced color tones. Which I don’t like using but sometime it acts as an important medium to lighten up the nearer objects.

Native Camera UI

Huawei usually ships different phones with different camera features and as well the interfaces. Whereas basic principle remains identical with three slides – live viewfinder in the middle, camera modes on the left-hand side, and the settings on the right-hand. You just need to swipe either way.

Camera modes include mostly common ones – Still photo and Pro photo, Video and Pro Video, HDR, Document scan, Panorama, Light painting, Time-lapse, Slow-mo, All-focus, Watermark and Audio note. You can download more as plugins. We’ll not cover all of them however for time constraint but major usability of the camera which is still photos, videos and sometime panorama.

Maximum resolution in still photos which is 12 megapixels or 3968 x 2976 pixels is served in 4:3 aspect ratio. For wide photos or photos in 16:9 aspect ratios, you need to shoot with 9 megapixels’ maximum resolution. But hold-on, it’s just the same and most common 16:9 mode that is not actually wider than the 4:3 photo. It just crops the photo from top and bottom to make it 16:9 – seriously it’s of no use. I recommend using full resolution mode unless the wider aspect ratio has the higher or equal resolution, which you won’t find in recent phones.

Pro Mode is seriously good in Huawei devices which is present in each of their phones. Features like manual shutter speed, ISO sensitivity, metering and focus are much common now but controlling white balance manually with kelvin temperature scale is too good in a smartphone.

EMUI 5 in Honor 8 Lite had some trouble with 3rd level of scales where you move the slider to set a value of e.g. range in manual focus, or kelvin value in white balance. Fortunately a recent software update fixed it.

Pro controls are also present in Video mode but that’s not so cool as there is no ISO control. Shutter speed is just out of question as it doesn’t make any sense in a smartphone with non-mechanical shutter. However still we have metering modes, EV and manual focus but still most important ones of them in video are the metering mode and manual white balance.

Still Photo Performances

Again, it’s the output result of the photos or videos out of a camera, which are important. The performance of the camera was good how it managed to keep low noises with good detail in image. But like Honor 6X, 8 Lite also has some good to deliver outdoors. Indoor shots weren’t that much sharp and had grain unless the environment is well lit.

Colors tones are quite impressive as the camera maintained it well and images are vibrant at some extent which is not overdone. Autofocus was fast mostly but some of the times it failed. Dynamic range is also not that good but HDR feature is there to help somewhat.

Using flash indoors is not a good idea mostly but sometime it helps when you don’t have to bring background object into light. Light on the focus object is well controlled and the tones are really good. Red-eye is the problem that the system doesn’t seem to control, nor I could see an option in photo edit mode.

You can check the photos below.

Outdoor Shots

Indoor Shots

Closeup Shots

Flash Shots

Video Recording

Video resolution is 1080p at maximum with 30 frames per second. 720p recording is also done at 30fps. Higher resolution records at 17 Mbps while the lower one uses 12 Mbps for good quality. Both supports stereo audio recording while there are even lower resolution options are available with single channel audio.

1080p / 30fps

720p / 30fps

8 Megapixel Front Camera

While it’s also the standard not-so-special front camera, it brings with EMUI 5, all-new selfie modes including an improved softening filter and panoramic option to capture even wider group photos, or group selfies – oh wait “usies”. Single non-panoramic photo will have a 77° wide angle field of view and even wider f/2.0 lens aperture. Honor 8 Lite supports screen flash when you take selfie in darker environments. It triggers automatically when enabled – you can’t force it like rear LED flash. There is new plugin management interface as well.