Honor 6 Plus review

With a name like 6 Plus, you might mistake Honor’s latest smartphone for a big screen version of the flagship Honor 6. It looks very similar from the front, with a practically identical metal frame and rounded corners. Flip it over, though, and you’ll find a bionic parallel camera.

It’s a similar idea to the HTC One M8‘s Duo Camera, but whereas HTC’s camera only produced 4-megapixel images, the Honor 6 Plus combines two 8-megapixel sensors to create 13-megapixel pictures. Honor says its high light sensitivity will help users create more professional-looking photos by reducing the amount of image noise.

^ The two cameras on the Honor 6 Plus sit just 0.5mm apart

Camera

While we wouldn’t say our outdoor photos were any less noisy than other smartphone cameras we’ve tested, they were bright and had some of the most natural-looking colours we’ve seen in recent months. At times, photos could almost be a little too bright, but switching to HDR mode tempered these shots very effectively.

^ Outdoor photos looked great. The sky was well exposed and colours were very rich vibrant

^ Shadows could be a bit bright at times, but switching to HDR mode (above) solved this problem instantly

The dual camera also lets you adjust the focal point of your photos once you’ve taken them if you use its Wide Aperture mode. Tapping the area of the photo you want to blur or bring into focus will display an onscreen slider that lets you change the aperture from f/0.95 to f/16.

It’s a lot more flexible than other cameras we’ve seen with this feature, and the depth of field effects in our test photos were impressive. Objects in focus really stood out against softer background areas, and Honor’s noise reduction technology really came into its own in our indoor test shots.

^ We’ve seen plenty of phones which let you adjust the focal length now, but the Honor 6 Plus is by far the most impressive

Dim the light a little, though, and noise quickly starts to creep back in. The shots we took of our indoor still life, for example, looked great when there was plenty of light, but switching off our lamp produced much dimmer colours and almost everything looked significantly grittier.

Turning on the flash helped smooth things out, but colours were still comparatively muted. The Super Night Mode can take up to 32 second exposures for more creative low light photography, but Honor recommends you use a tripod for best results.

^ Indoors with plenty of light, the Honor 6 Plus produced perfectly decent photos

^ However, turning our lamp off with only natural light coming in from the left meant photos took on a much more muted appearance

Honor hasn’t forgotten about the front-facing camera either; it has a 22mm, wide-angle 8-megapixel sensor to help set it above the now commonplace 5-megapixel cameras you’ll find in other smartphones. Our test shots looked good, too, as noise was kept to a minimum and colours looked natural and accurate. The copious amount of filters and watermark stamps should be enough to keep even the most demanding selfie fan happy.