Three things in life are certain: death, taxes, and Honor partnering with a luxury brand to promote its latest mobile innovation. Having partnered with Burberry, British Vogue and Porsche Design on a series of high-end mobile products over the past year, the Chinese electronics brand has now joined forces with legendary French photography studio Studio Harcourt on a cutting-edge portrait mode for its latest phone, the Honor 200 Pro.
Famous for its black and white portraits of movie stars and celebrities, Studio Harcourt has immortalized the likes of Ingrid Bergman, Salvador Dalí, Cate Blanchett and Roger Federer at various points in its 91-year history, and the Honor 200 Pro is aim to put the secret sauce of studying in the hands of everyday smartphone users by combining high-end hardware with artificial intelligence software.
Honor has used the latter to condense the four key components of a Studio Harcourt portrait – professional makeup, complex lighting, advanced hardware and expert post-production – into one seamless on-device photography process. Basically, you get one glorified filter (or rather three glorified filters: Harcourt Classic, Harcourt Vibrant, and Harcourt Color), but the Honor 200 Pro offers portraits that feel really different from those you can take with even the best camera phones.
@techradar ♬ stellar (Sped Up) – .diedlonely & énouement
I was given a tour of Studio Harcourt in Paris to see for myself how the Honor 200 Pro recreates the Harcourt method of photography. And as you can see in the images below, the phone did a great job of making me seem decidedly more important than I am in real life (mind you, I doubt I'll get a call about the vacant James Bond job anytime soon). soon).
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Of course, these portraits were captured in optimal lighting conditions at Studio Harcourt itself, but the Honor 200 Pro proved capable of taking great portraits in everyday settings as well. We wrote in our review of the Honor 200 Pro: “The results [using the phone’s Studio Harcourt mode] can be impressive. It's most effective with portraits (after all, that's what the feature is designed for), but we also got great results with animals.
“Harcourt Color is a similar effect, but in color, as its name suggests. Create images with a beautiful warm color palette. Both modes add an artificial bokeh effect and also appear to accentuate lens flare from light sources. Honor’s edge detection is second to none and we were really impressed with how well it managed to cut through clumps of hair and other difficult scenes.”
In other words, the Honor 200 Pro is a portrait photography powerhouse, and thanks to its Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 chipset, 6.8-inch OLED display, and large 5,200mAh battery, it's also a great all-rounder.
The Honor 200 Pro costs £699.99 in the UK and comes in one storage configuration: 512GB with 12GB of RAM. It's available for pre-order now directly from Honor, although like all other Honor phones, it won't go on sale in the US or Australia.
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