Honor 5X review

The Honor 5X comes with a 13MP camera, which compared to some of the other phones in this price range is surprisingly high. The truth is though, it's not as good as some of the competition but it'll get the job done.

The 5X camera isn't mesmerising and you're not going to get flagship levels of quality shots. If you compare these photos to what the Samsung Galaxy S7 or the iPhone 6S can do it looks quite embarrassing.

Even the Huawei Mate 8 has a far better camera technology than the Honor 5X, but it's certainly not the worst on the market.

Pixel quality on the Honor 5X isn't an issue, but a lot of the photos I took while testing out the phone felt washed out without much vibrancy to any of the images.

It especially struggled in darker settings and I really struggled to get anything without the flash being turned on.

In a darkened restaurant I struggled to get a good quality shot from candle light. This is probably why Honor has left the automatic flash on with the 5X, but the flash was just over exposed.

I was pleasantly surprised by the zoom on the Honor 5X. I managed to get quite far into an image without losing much of the pixel quality.

Other features on the rear camera include Beauty mode that smoothes out blemishes in faces, video which is up to 1080p and timelapse, which does exactly what you'd expect.

The UI within the camera app on the Honor 5X is quite functional compared to some of the other elements of Emotion UI. Accessing all the different features and editing the settings of an image is simple and everything is easy to access quickly when you need to take a fast shot.

Another nice touch of the camera app is if you leave it open without taking photos or recording it will go into a screensaver mode just to save a little on the battery. That can be useful for when you forget the camera app is open.

Swing round to the front of the phone and there's a 5MP selfie shooter for all your narcissistic needs. Don't expect anything special here, but it's still a suitable front facing camera for whenever you want to send silly photos to your friends.

A lot of Chinese manufacturers are upping the front-facing camera specs to try and get even better photos on the front than the back can do.

Phones such as the Oppo F1 and the Huawei Mate 8 both have 8MP selfie cameras while the Sony Xperia M5 goes all the way up to 13MP.

I don't personally see the reason in getting this level of front facing shots. I do take quite a few selfies, but a standard 5MP camera like this does the job.

You don't need a high-end shot, it's just for the odd social networking post and I'd recommend sticking to this and keeping the price low. Unless you're really in it for the selfie camera though, if so be sure to check out our selfie test.