Honor has officially launched its Magic 9 series in China, and while there are a couple of new models, it is the Honor Magic 9 Pro Max that is the most exciting for photographers and filmmakers.
The headline feature is an ambitious triple-camera system developed around Honor’s new partnership with cinema camera specialist ARRI. This is the second Honor-ARRI collaboration after the niche Honor Robot phone – which put a pop-up gimbal camera on the back of a smartphone – and the first taste of ARRI’s contributions in a mainstream device.
ARRI’s involvement goes beyond simply lending its name to the cameras. The Magic 9 Pro Max can record up to 4K 60p using an ARRI Cinema Mode, with ARRI LogC3, 10-bit color and ARRI Wide Gamut 3. For more tuned footage straight out of the camera, there are 14 ARRI Looks built in, with access to a wider library of 87 Looks that can be imported and applied to footage.
The Magic 9 Pro Max camera system consists of a 200MP main camera with a large 1/1.28-inch sensor, f/1.57 aperture and OIS, alongside a second 200MP telephoto camera using a 1/1.4-inch sensor and f/2.6 aperture, while a 50MP f/2 ultrawide completes the trio.
Up front is a 55MP camera paired with a 3D depth sensor, with an Apple-style square-format sensor allowing landscape or portrait compositions without physically rotating the phone. It’s unclear at this stage if either the front or rear cameras support open gate recording.
Honor is making particularly bold claims about stabilization. Both the 200MP main and telephoto cameras carry a CIPA 8.0 stabilization rating, while the main camera offers what Honor calls 3-degree “gimbal-level” stabilization, designed to compensate for considerably more movement than conventional smartphone OIS, and without having to rely on electronic image stabilization (EIS) cropping into an image.
While internal audio often gets overlooked on phones, with wireless mics so cheap and prevalent, the Magic 9 has ambitions to make internal audio recording more feasible without needing additional accessories with a four-microphone Cinematic Directional Microphone system. Honor is promising targeted directional pickup, isolating background noise around your subject, even from a distance. The demos so far look very cool, but I’m eager to see how this compares to external mics in less controlled situations.
Finally, in the camera department, it seems no modern Chinese flagship phone is complete without an optional photography kit, so Honor is treating us to a new Photography Master Kit that includes 200mm and 500mm teleconverter lenses. The Magic9 Pro Max also supports a dedicated SmallRig mobile video kit with handles and connection points for accessories, including a cooling fan for long recording sessions.
Powering all of this is Qualcomm’s newly announced Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6, paired with Honor’s own H1 imaging processor. Interestingly, despite Qualcomm advertising support for 8K/60p and 4K/240p capture from the Extreme chip, the Magic9 Pro Max itself tops out at 4K/60p.
The other number of note is the enormous 8,800mAh battery (although that number is likely to be lower when the phone reaches the EU due to battery regulations) with 100W wired and 80W wireless charging. There is also a 6.8-inch 1-120Hz LTPO OLED display, and up to 16GB of RAM and 1TB of storage.
The Honor Magic 9 series has just gone on sale in China, and Honor has confirmed that an international launch is planned, although it has yet to say when the Magic 9 Pro Max will arrive in markets including the UK and Europe (the US, as usual, won’t get an official launch).
When it does make the journey overseas, the Magic 9 Pro Max looks set to be one of Honor’s most serious attempts yet to challenge the best camera phones and best phones for video.
