Testing the Honor 200 camera phone with square shadows and light
My old phone had seen better days and I noticed that the in-camera jpgs it was producing were terrible. I don’t know why this was because I remember it taking half-decent photos back in the day. Maybe the plastic covering over the lenses had faded or scratched but the results it was producing were embarrassing. I don’t make a habit of grabbing my phone when taking photos as I almost always have a ‘proper’ camera on me, but recently I’d been uploading reviews of anchorages for a sailing app and made a point of adding one image for each review. That whole process is a lot easier when done in a single workflow on the phone, but as a photographer who prides himself in taking good shots, irrespective of where they get uploaded to, I figured it was time for an upgrade.
Honor 200: Budget-Not-Budget Phone
I still haven’t reached that stage where my phone has become my primary photography tool and therefore don’t place much importance on its photo-taking abilities. Still, these days even the ‘budget’ phones now produce half-decent results. By ‘budget’, I’m talking around $400, which is a little misleading since you can pick up a phone for $150 and still get good results, but $400 still falls short of the mid-range phones. I checked DXOmark and the only other phones better than the Honor 200 in the same price bracket was the more expensive Pro version, as well as the Google Pixel (also more expensive and, more importantly, not yet available in Malaysia, though I believe that will change soon). The Honor 200 Pro and the Pixel were outside my budget.
Lots of Options
One of the features the Honor 200 camera has, which I am sure most cameras have these days, is the option to change the dimensions of the image taken. I thought for my first test I’d switch to square and see if I could create some Instagramable photos. I say that but I have no intention of posting these on Instagram, not least because I’ve stopped using that awful app, but that’s another story.
Shadows and Light
With the late afternoon sun casting shapes across the back of my parent’s house, I had half an hour to play with the shadows and the light.
Good results, even on a big screen
For social-media posting and general ease-of-use, this is not a bad phone for the price. I made a point of sticking with jpegs, not raw (although I threw them through the Lightroom app to make some minor adjustments). I wanted a quick workflow and wanted to test how the phone performs when processing the jpeg in-camera. What I was surprised to see was how well these photos have come out now that I am viewing them on a large monitor.
Helping my creativity
Changing the dimensions of the image captured is a positive way of encouraging me to try different photographic approaches. Setting a one-hour photo walk to only take in 1×1 pushes my creative comfort zone. In fact, after spending half an hour last night playing with these images, I picked up one of my 6×6 medium-format film cameras and loaded a roll of 120!
Oh, if you’re interested, I tested the video on this camera and it is pretty good. The stabilisation works well.
