We all love to look good for the socials, don’t we? Our vanity is the reason why camera smartphones are a thing anyway, and it’s no doubt why HONOR has teamed up with Studio Harcourt for the HONOR 200 Pro.

If you’re unfamiliar with Studio Harcourt, just as I was, they are a prestigious Paris-based photography studio dating way back to 1934. Over the years, the studio has garnered a reputation of capturing dignified black-and-white portraits of celebrities, some notable names being Keanu Reeves, Roger Federer, and Zinedine Zidane.

To be frank, upon hearing about the collab, it didn’t quite excite me as much as, say, the Xiaomi and Leica partnership. Studio Harcourt, after all, is just a studio, while Leica are camera and lens makers themselves, which means they bring a whole lot more to camera hardware.

Nevertheless, we’re also aware that until we get our hands on it, our verdicts would merely be assumptions. So, we did what any curious tech brand would do: spend RM2,699 just so we could test it ourselves.

Here’s what we thought about the HONOR 200 Pro after using it for a month.

Build and Design

I know there’s a lot of talk and marketing around the HONOR 200 Pro being an ‘aesthetic flagship’, but it just falls flat to my taste. The oblong-shaped camera housing just seems too awkward and out of place. And maybe it’s just me, but at certain angles the closely-packed circular lenses bring back hair-raising visions of trypophobia (think: the infamous lotus plant).

Taste is subjective though, so by all means, feel free to love it if you appreciate the artistry.

There are still some saving graces here, like the dual-textured panels on the Ocean Cyan colour and the curved rear panels, which feel great to hold. Plus, it’s incredibly slim at 8.2mm.

In fact, everything else, barring the gaudy camera bump is stellar. It even has decent protection, with an IP65 rating topping it all off.

Day-to-day Performance

To no surprise, the HONOR 200 Pro utilizes the Snapdragon 8s Gen 3, an upper mid-range chipset also found in its competitors, namely the POCO F6 and realme GT 6. Its architecture is largely based on the flagship Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 processor, with a few cutbacks here and there to fit the price range.

In real-world usage, we didn’t encounter any problems with the performance of the HONOR 200 Pro. It’s a snappy device capable of running your favourite social media apps. Animations are unflinchingly smooth with no choppy disruptions, and the responsiveness of the fingerprint sensor deserves a shout-out too.

Moreover, visuals were pretty great thanks to the 6.78″ OLED panel offering a 1.5K high resolution and 120Hz refresh rates. Brightness is impressive, with HONOR claiming it peaks at 4,000nits. From our experience, adjusting the brightness slider to its maximum is enough to retain clarity even under harsh, scorching sunlight.

Batteries too, are pretty decent, being able to give 9 hours of screentime before hitting the 15% mark. In those 9 hours, nearly 7 hours were spent on YouTube, with the remaining time allocated to social media and some Genshin Impact. Charging, as you would expect, is swift with the 100W power brick that comes in the box.

Gaming Performance

The HONOR 200 Pro is capable of running even graphically demanding games like Genshin Impact with high settings, despite the game warning that the “Current performance load is too high, which can lead to overheating and serious lags in game performance.” You’d be pleased to know that there was no overheating, nor was there any inhibiting lag.

Graphics and fighting animations too, were on par with what we experienced with the POCO F6 Pro which utilizes the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, which you can take to mean it has flagship-like capabilities.

There is a little bit of a wait time shifting between maps. The load time is noticeably longer, but not detrimental to the point it completely puts you off playing.

Aside from that, the HONOR 200 Pro handled Call of Duty and Mobile Legends like a champ, just as we expected after it cleared the Genshin hurdle with ease.

MagicOS

The MagicOS experience have been equally pleasant. The Magic Capsule – which is pretty much the Android version of Apple’s Dynamic Island – works well with apps like Spotify. Is it necessary? Well, I could live without it, but it’s nice to have anyway.

The customizable app folders are wonderful. You’re not restricted to cramming all your apps into a 1×1 folder, nor are you limited to just a square. Instead, you can elongate these vertically like a drop-down menu, or enlarge it to a rectangle to fit as much as 18 apps in a folder. The bottom line is there’s plenty of room for homepage customization here which is commendable.

Then, there’s Magic Portal, which makes, or rather, attempts to make cross-app transfers easier. Say, you have an image that you want to search on Google. Simply touch and hold the image, drag it to the right where a series of compatible apps will appear, and drop the image onto the Google icon to start the search. Sound familiar? That’s because it’s kind of like Samsung’s Circle to Search, except this is sort of…drag to search?

Anyway, the neat thing here is that it works with other apps too. So if you have a photo you want posted on Instagram: touch and hold, drag it to the right, and drop it on the Instagram icon. Or if you need directions to a location: highlight the text, drag right, but drop it onto the Google Maps or Waze icon instead.

As a whole, user experience on the HONOR 200 Pro has been a breeze, which certainly redeems itself from its questionable aesthetic.

Cameras

Finally, we reach the star of the show. HONOR harped plenty about its Studio Harcourt-inspired cameras on the 200 Pro, so naturally, I was excited to see what all the fuss was about.

For the record, the phone features a triple-camera array consisting of a 50MP portrait camera, a 50MP telephoto lens, and a 12MP ultrawide lens. Where you’ll see the Studio Harcourt touch in fruition is under Portrait Mode, where you can select between three filters: Harcourt Vibrant, Harcourt Colour, and Harcourt Classic.

Harcourt Portrait Filters

I must say, HONOR’s backing of its cameras are not without substance. I was really pleased with how the little photoshoot of my collectibles turned out, as you can see in the following samples (I’m wayyy too self-conscious to take my own portraits, so you’ll have to make do with my Funko Pop figurine instead).

The portrait shots were nearly perfect, accurately outlining the subject from the bokeh background while keeping much of the subject in focus. Bokeh renders on mid-rangers can be a little too artificial at times, ruining portraits either with an over-the-top creamy background, or with blurriness seeping into the subject’s outline.

Thankfully, that wasn’t the case here, with the accurate bokeh and subject separation.

Even with 2x zoom in Portrait mode, the bokeh remained natural with a pleasing magnification of the background, all of which made my figurine stand out even more.

We did encounter a few bugs in Portrait Mode, especially when the subject’s colours matched those of the background. One example can be seen in the photo below, where the camera struggled to differentiate between the subject and the background, resulting in a poorly focused and unnatural bokeh.

This only happened once, though, and given how small my LEGO man was, perhaps the camera had a hard time differentiating the subject from the background.

The rest of our experience with the Portrait Mode went smoothly, so we’ll chalk this up as an excusable blip.

Ultra-wide, Main, and Zoom

Even my experience with the main, telephoto, and ultra-wide lenses was impressive. Colours were consistent and accurate to the scene, and details remained sharp across the 2.5x optical zoom.

At 10x zoom, there’s a visible drop in quality as you would expect with most smartphone cameras using digital zoom. Although the subjects remain in focus, you can clearly see pixelation in the green and purple plants towards the edge of the frame.

Digital zooms is generally unadvisable to begin with, even on flagships. As long as you stick to the ultra-wide, main camera, and 2-2.5x optical zoom, your photos should turn out fine.

What’s the verdict?

What’s our verdict for the HONOR 200 Pro? From a personal standpoint, the aesthetics aren’t for me. Nevertheless, this is undeniably a great phone in both hardware and software.

Performance is well-rounded, with the phone capable of running demanding mobile games, and the software experience has been a joy as well.

The Studio Harcourt collab turned out pretty great in the end, although I would love to see HONOR team up with full-fledged camera makers in the future. This would certainly inject more excitement into the hardware, much like the co-engineering partnerships between Xiaomi and Leica, OPPO and Hasselblad, or even vivo and ZEISS.

For the time being, assuming you have no gripes with the design, the HONOR 200 Pro is a stellar mid-ranger to have.

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