Frankly, portrait shots are stunning. I said earlier that these might be the best portrait shots I’ve seen from a phone, and that’s not rhetoric. These shots are downright fabulous. Don’t get me wrong, there are some that aren’t amazing, but overall, it would be very hard to not take a great portrait shot of a subject with this phone, in any mode. Colors are awesome and the bokeh is top-notch. It’s one of the best phones to handle wisps of hair around a subject’s head.

But the question is, does the Honor 200 Pro do anything that another phone can’t replicate? The short is no. The super nuanced answer is, sure. We’re about to get super nerdy and picky here, so strap in. But before we get too far, allow me to shout out the model that posed for our group of 12 journalists individually, followed by me who produced no less than four phones. She had the patience of a saint. So, here’s what happened in Harcourt’s studio.

Take these two photos. One was shot on the Honor 200 Pro (left) and the other was shot on the OnePlus Open (right) with the black and white filter enabled.

Then there’s these two, taken with the iPhone 15 Pro (on the left) and the Pixel 8 Pro (on the right). The difference here is that these photos were taken in color and converted to black and white with a filter. The Pixel 8 Pro photo is a virtual carbon copy of the OnePlus and Honor phones. The iPhone is a different story. It produced a much more evenly lit photo (despite Harcourt’s lighting) and overall captured quite a bit more detail, which is simply a different philosophy when it comes to photography. Nothing wrong with that.

But where that leaves us is that in this setting, the Honor phone doesn’t do much more than any other high-end phone. So, let’s leave the studio.