A decent dual camera setup
The Honor Magic8 Lite is pretty similar to both the Honor X9d and the Honor X70. The similarities are certainly visual, but go beyond skin-deep as well. The Honot Magic8 Lite takes after the Honor X9d in the camera department.
You get what is essentially a dual rear camera setup, despite the visual illusion of more sensors on the circular camera island. The main camera is a high-resolution 108MP unit with PDAF and OIS.
It is accompanied by a rather underwhelming 5MP ultrawide camera. So, there is certainly some give and some take in the resolution department. The 5MP unit is expectedly fixed-focus, so definitely don’t expect any miracles.
Wide (main): 108 MP Samsung ISOCELL HM6 f/1.75, 1/1.67″, 1.0µm, PDAF, OIS; 2160p@30fps
Ultra wide angle: 5 MP, f/2.2; 1080p@30fps
Front camera: 16 MP, f/2.45; 1080p@30fps
The selfie camera is also borrowed straight from the Honor X9d. It is a decent 16MP snapper, which is a bit light on the extras and has fixed focus Again, temper your expectations accordingly.
There is nothing particularly interesting or odd about the camera app. Everything is laid out logically and there are plenty of options to play around with. This includes a Pro photo mode with white balance, manual focus, exposure, shutter speed, ISO and metering mode controls.
Daylight photo quality
Main camera
The main camera captures 9-way-binned 12MP stills by default. There is certainly no shortage of resolution. The detail is good as well, even if not spectacular.
Colors look pretty good overall: not overly saturated, but certainly no dull. Contrast and dynamic range could both use some work, but are decent-enough for this class of phone.
Honor Magic8 Lite: 12MP main camera samples
You can force the main camera to capture in its full 108MP resolution. The results are certainly a bit sharper when pixel-peeping, but we frankly wouldn’t say you get more detail. At least not a meaningful amount. If there is an improvement, it’s marginal and certainly not worth the jump in file size, at least in our book.
Honor Magic8 Lite: 108MP main camera samples
Otherwise, you pretty much get the same quality characteristics. Capture time is also quite snappy.
There is no dedicated telephoto on the Magic8 Lite. However, there is a 3x zoom toggle right on the camera UI. At 3x digital zoom, shots look pretty decent. Certain things like text and numbers are well rendered overall, but at the same time uniform surfaces like skies and grass are a bit softer than we would have liked.
Honor Magic8 Lite: 12MP main camera 3x zoom samples
The Magic8 Lite handles human subjects quite competently. Skin texture coms through well and skin tones look very natural. Here are some samples from the main camera at 1x and 2x, which you do have to dial-in manually through pinch-to-zoom.
Honor Magic8 Lite: 12MP main camera samples
Honor Magic8 Lite: 12MP main camera 2x zoom samples
We are only including the 2x samples here since the portrait mode on the Magic8 Lite offers 1x and 2x toggles in its UI.
Honor Magic8 Lite: 12MP main camera portrait samples
Honor Magic8 Lite: 12MP main camera 2x zoom portrait samples
The Magic8 Lite captures very competent portraits. On top of the already mentioned great subject quality, these shots also feature great subject detection and separation and very convincing background blur quality.
Ultrawide camera
The 5MP ultrawide camera is expectedly not very impressive in any way. It captures very soft shots with not a lot of detail. Dynamic range and contrast are quite poor too.
Honor Magic8 Lite: 5MP ultrawide camera samples
Selfie camera
The 16MP selfie camera is quite decent in practice. Selfies look pretty clean and sharp with plenty of skin texture coming through and nice skin tones.
Honor Magic8 Lite: 16MP selfie camera samples
That said, we can’t say there anything here to phone home about. You still get fixed focus and no extra features to speak of.
Low-light camera quality
The low-light performance of the main camera is solid. There is plenty of detail in the frame with nice colors. Even the dynamic range is not half bad. Both the shadows and highlights are well developed. There is practically no noise either. An impressive showing all around.
Honor Magic8 Lite: 12MP low-light main camera samples
At 3x digital zoom photos still look very good. A bit softer and slightly noisier, as expected. Still very much usable, though.
Honor Magic8 Lite: 12MP low-light main camera 3x zoom samples
The Honor Magic8 Lite has automatic night mode which triggers quite reliably. Beyond that there is a manual night mode as well. For some reason, however, it is only available for the main camera. Not the ultrawide and not the selfie.
Looking at night mode shots compared to the auto ones, we did not really see much difference. Perhaps small bits here and there, but that’s more shot-to-shot variance than anything else.
Honor Magic8 Lite: 12MP night mode main camera samples
Honor Magic8 Lite: 12MP night mode main camera 3x zoom samples
Expectedly, the ultrawide camera with its meager 5MP resolution, struggles quite badly in low-light conditions. To be fair, the detail is not actually that bad. However, everything is very soft with a lot of noise.
Honor Magic8 Lite: 5MP low-light ultrawide camera samples
Selfies don’t look half-bad. There is plenty of detail and skin texture and skin tones come through nicely.
Honor Magic8 Lite: 16MP low-light selfie camera samples
Video capture quality
The Magic8 Lite maxes out its video capture at 4K@30fps and that’s on the main camera. The ultrawide is limited to 1080p@30fps. Videos get saved in an AVC/h.264 stream at around 50 Mbps by default, with a stereo 48 kHz AAC audio stream. If you prefer, there is the option to use the more efficient HEVC/h.265 codec instead and save space at the same quality level.
Video quality at 1x on the main camera is pretty good, but far from perfect. Detail is nice and there is practically no noise. However, the videos are a bit dark and dynamic range is quite limited.
At 2x zoom, 4K videos have a lot of shimmering on fine details. It doesn’t help either that the stabilization on the main cam is not particularly good. There is no dedicated stabilization mode or a toggle available. Don’t expect smooth video.
FullHD video from the ultrawide camera is dark with no abundance of detail and limited dynamic range.
The main camera does well enough in low light, but fails to impress. The detail is decent, however, the frame is quite noisy and rather dark. At 3x videos are darker, softer and noisier still. Low-light ultrawide videos are very soft and not particularly detailed. Light sources are very blown out.
You can check out the playlist below, which includes multiple video samples.