The Huawei Honor 5X Review: Mid-Range Meets Maturity

Camera Architecture

In the past it was the case that non flagship smartphones had to compromise the camera experience pretty severely. The SoCs didn't have image signal processors that could compete with flagship devices, and the sensors were generally pretty poor, with some not even supporting autofocus. Nowadays we see the camera sensors from the flagship phones of one or two years prior making their way into mid range devices, which has improved image quality dramatically. Even at $199, the Honor 5X ships with a very capable camera setup, and you can view the specifics of both the front and rear-facing sensors below.

Something interesting is the fact that the Honor 5X uses the same camera sensor arrangement as the OnePlus One. The front camera is Omnivision's OV5648 while the rear is Sony's IMX214 which we've also seen on the Moto G (2015) and the Nexus 6. As I said before, these mid range devices are shipping with very capable sensors. Unfortunately, image processing is often still an issue, which isn't helped by the fact that the ISPs in these mid range SoCs still lag behind those in flagships. Offering sufficiently high quality image processing would definitely put the Honor 5X ahead of the competition.

Still Image Testing

With the weather in the Canadian tundra having settled down a bit I've been able to return to my typical photo scenes rather than utilizing photos taken by Josh. With the Honor 5X using the same rear-facing camera as the Moto G and Nexus 6 those will be the most obvious points of comparison, although equivalently priced devices like the Zenfone 2 are included as well, as well as the iPhone 6s and Galaxy S6 Edge for flagship reference points. As always, the first test is taken with enough sunlight that all devices should be shooting at base ISO with a very quick shutter speed.

When I compare the Honor 5X's daylight image to other phones, as well as to how the scene looked to my eyes, there are two things that are immediately apparent. The first is the fact that Huawei's photo simply isn't as sharp as the one taken by the Moto G or the Nexus 6. The thin branches of the foliage are much blurrier, and this is most obvious with the tree on the right side of the frame which is very hazy and blurry on the Honor 5X, but fairly sharp on the other IMX214 devices. The second obvious observation is that the Honor 5X's white balance is skewed too far toward blue, with the entire photo having a colder appearance than it should. The Honor 5X's white balance actually makes the scene look more like what you'd see on a cloudy day, despite the fact that the sky is clear. This isn't necessarily a bad thing as far as photo quality goes, but it's definitely not true to how the scene originally looked.

One other issue with the Honor 5X's image is the heavy noise in the sky. The Zenfone 2 suffers from this as well, but the rest of the smartphones don't really have an issue with this.

When taking photos during the day the Honor 5X does alright, but it doesn't do as well as the Moto G which uses the same sensor. Huawei could definitely improve their camera processing to improve image quality when shooting during the day, and it's something they should be thinking about as they issue software updates to the Honor 5X.

In night time photography the Honor 5X struggles, which isn't uncommon for these mid range devices. Comparing to the Nexus 6 and Moto G reveals some interesting differences. The Nexus 6 definitely wins, although it's really showing its age by this point. The Honor 5X and Moto G handle their processing in two different ways. The Moto G has significant chroma noise which is very distracting, while the Honor 5X doesn't. However, the Moto G's image also retains more detail, while the Honor 5X's image looks blurrier and less detailed. This is due to Huawei's heavier noise reduction, which is removing the noise but removing details along with it. Ultimately, this is a trade off where no method is clearly better than the other, and in this case I would probably say that the Honor 5X is better due to how distracting chroma noise is, but other people may feel that the Honor 5X's less detailed image is the worse of the two.

Video Recording

The Honor 5X can record 1080p video at 30fps. This is pretty much par for the course with mid range Android phones, but this is a situation where differences in processing quality can result in enormous differences between devices that you would expect to perform similarly.

The 1080p30 video from the Honor 5X is encoded at 20Mbps using the H.264 Baseline profile. Huawei has something on their website talking about H.265 compression and it seems to be implying that the phone uses it for video, but there's absolutely no way to do so and the phone isn't capable of H.265 encoding in hardware anyway. It is capable of decoding HEVC streams, which is a feature shared among all Snapdragon 615 and 616 devices.

The quality of the Honor 5X's 1080p video is unfortunately not very good. It's just really blurry across the entire frame, and pretty shaky. One redeeming attribute is that the frame rate seems to be fairly stable, which can sometimes be a problem on low end and mid range smartphones when the exposure changes or you move quickly during a video.

One other feature Huawei advertises is the ability to do slow-mo video recording. I didn't even bother putting a video sample for this because the feature just isn't worth using. The videos are recorded at 640x480 at 120fps, but I'm fairly sure that it's really a video shot at a lower frame rate that is being interpolated to 120fps. When played back at normal speed it doesn't look as fluid as 120fps video, and when you slow it down the gaps between frames are really large and the video becomes quite stuttery. This is on top of the low resolution and bitrate, and while I applaud Huawei for trying to bring this feature to mid range phones, the ISP is just not up to the task.