Honor Holly Review - Camera Review
Camera
Moto G 2-rivalling specs only let down by some software quirks
Sections
- Page 1 Honor Holly Review
- Page 2 Software and Performance Review
- Page 3 Camera Review
- Page 4 Battery Life, Call and Verdict Review
Honor Holly – Camera
For camera specs, the Holly matches the Moto G 2 and the Honor 3C, packing an 8-megapixel main sensor with an LED flash, and a 2-megapixel front-facing one to cover selfie and videocalling duty. That’s a mid-range setup that ensures the Holly delivers a solid, all-round performance. You’ll still need to contend with some issues, mostly around the sluggish shutter and processing speeds, but it beats most smartphone cameras at this price.
The Holly’s camera app is pretty basic, with modes and features evenly distributed around the screen for quick access. In the top right, there’s HDR, flash control and camera switching. Down the left-hand side is where you’ll find a choice of shooting modes – Normal, Panorama, Face Beauty, and a Live Photo mode for shooting video. There’s a decent array of manual settings as well, letting you adjust exposure, white balance, saturation and contrast.
In good daylight, you can capture some rewarding images. Colours are
generally accurate, there’s a nice level of sharpness, albeit not without
some signs of image noise. It even performs well for close-up images, as the flower shot below illustrates.
For low-light shooting, it can struggle to handle light sources and the shutter speed really counts against its ability to consistently shoot without some blurriness, but it copes better than most £100 phones. Unlike HDR modes on more accomplished phones, the Holly’s doesn’t dramatically improve the image quality, focusing more on brightening than actually balancing the photo.
Up front, the 2-megapixel sensor is of the level you’d expect from a phone at this price and delivers decent images with just a little noise.
For shooting video, there’s a surprising number of options available, such as electronic image stabilisation, microphone support, and various audio settings to spruce things up. Video quality is up to 1080p Full HD and despite some slightly juddery moments, the sensor can capture good-quality footage with vibrant colours and all-round better performance than you’ll get from most cheap phones.
How we test phones
We test every mobile phone we review thoroughly. We use industry standard tests to compare features properly and we use the phone as our main device over the review period. We’ll always tell you what we find and we never, ever, accept money to review a product.