Honor 7A Camera Review

Lakshmi Rajan — Sat, 09 Jun 2018 00:21:53 +0000

If you have ears on the Indian Smartphone market, you would have heard a lot of conversations around Honor in the recent months, the company has been super aggressive in India with back to back Smartphone launches. The aggressiveness seemed to have paid them off too with the Honor brand making into the list of top five brands in India for the first time with a 146 per cent growth. The latest to be enlisted into their Indian portfolio is the new 7 twins – the Honor 7A and 7C, with the 7A being the most affordable of the two. Priced at Rs 8,999 the Honor 7A arrives in a price segment that is competitive but still offers the brands a wider pie to take their own piece of cake. Camera is something that most use a lot in their Smartphone and if you are thinking of buying Honor 7A go ahead check out our Honor 7A camera review.

Honor 7A Camera Specifications

13MP + 2MP dual camera (rear)
F/2.2 aperture
phase detection autofocus, LED flash
1080p video
8MP Selfie camera
F/2.0
Front LED flash
1080p video
Camera modes : Photo,video, HDR, Panorama, Good Food, Document scan
Settings mode: Smile capture, Touch to capture, ultra snapshot, timer

Honor 7A app loads faster and is quick to access with a simple yet intuitive interface. The main screen of the app is not cluttered, you see the preview pane that also shows the last photo in the gallery, photo and video buttons. On top has the flash, wide aperture, beauty mode and toggle for front and rear cameras. Swiping on the screen left or right, takes you to modes and settings page. The modes are stripped down version with less options unlike in some of the higher range Honor Smartphones. We have the photo, video, HDR, panorama, filters, watermark, good food and document scan options. There is no slo-mo or timelapse option for the videos.

The settings tab has timer, touch to capture, smile captures, burst shoot, set of options for volume button functions to assign for shutter which is by default or zoom / focus. Double pressing volume down button when the screen is off can be used to open camera and take a quick snapshot or just open camera.

Now let’s move on the camera quality.

Honor 7A Camera in good day light conditions

Rest assured of carrying some good memories of images when taken under good sunlight. The Honor 7A does a decent job at it. The color reproduction is natural, what you see is what you get in the final image. There is no artificial color / saturation enhancements. The color tones are natural and I liked it. The dynamic range is a bit weaker but then for an affordable Smartphone under Rs 10,000 that would be nitpicking. If you look at the flowers in the pictures, it has come appreciably true to the original color which I kind of like it. [gallery columns="4" link="file" ids="13576,13577,13578,13579,13580,13581,13582" orderby="rand"]

Honor 7A Camera in Indoor lightings

How about coming indoors and trying the camera? The picture says it all. Any room for complaints? Not at all for this price. Even in the various ambient light settings, the colors are natural and close to the original. [gallery link="file" columns="4" ids="13559,13558,13557,13556,13555,13554,13553" orderby="rand"]

Honor 7A Camera in Low lights

Low light photography can be challenging even for some of the flagships and for mid-rangers it gets even more difficult and at entry-level segment it becomes a nightmare in some of the mobiles. While we have seen a lot of improvements in recent time in the mobile camera technology, it still is tough situation to handle the camera in low light situations. We have seen Honor / Huawei doing remarkably well in the last quarter to tackle this and the parent company’s Huawei P20 Pro has the best low light camera optics I have ever seen in mobiles. With Honor 7A, it still is a challenge considering the aggressive pricing, nevertheless the Honor 7A could manage decently well low light photos, but as expected there are some noises in the images. [gallery link="file" columns="4" ids="13563,13562,13561,13560"]

Honor 7A capturing people

So how does it capture people? There is no special portrait mode but it does a decent job and you can notice some soft backgrounds. The details are decently detailed for this segment. You can also experiment with wide aperture for the background depth and play around post-capture in the edit mode.

Honor 7A wide aperture mode

There is no portrait mode in Honor 7A but there is the wide aperture mode. While the portrait mode and wide aperture both play with the aperture levels, the portrait mode we see these days in many dual camera Smartphones is tailor made for people but wide aperture gives you more control to handle the amount of bokeh, the subject you want the depth field to highlight etc. What it also gives is the freedom to control the aperture in the edit mode of the images.

The picture below was captured with wide aperture and it gives a nice highlight to the brand while keeping the rest in a soft blur. I particularly liked this capture.

The picture below was taken with wide aperture and then later in the photo edit option I had manually set the wide aperture at 5 (you get maximum 6)

In this image, I had changed the reading in the wide aperture in the edit option to 5. You can see the background blur pronounced.

The wide aperture mode gives more flexibility and ability to control the focus later. Videos can be shot on 1080p both with the front and rear cameras. The focusing is again decent, though there is no EIS image stabilisation which is a very rare inclusion in any case in this segment.

Verdict

Honor 7A is a reliable, decent Smartphone for photography. If you love the natural colors, this camera would impress you for the price it comes at.

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honor 7a – Tech Raman