Does the Honor Magic 7 Pro AI Super Zoom take things too far?

AI, we’re told, is going to change everything. “This cutting-edge smartphone sets a new standard for AI devices, with AI features that seamlessly apply intelligence to make people’s lives easier, faster and more pleasurable,” said Bond Zhang, CEO of Honor UK on the launch of the new Honor Magic 7 Pro.

It’s a message we’ve heard across the board, from Google, Apple, Samsung and others: we’re constantly being told that AI is going to make our lives better. But when I got my hands on the new Honor Magic 7 Pro, I wasn’t prepared for this headline AI feature to quite literally change everything.

Say hello to Honor AI Super Zoom

A couple of years ago when Google announced the Pixel 8 Pro, I wrote that all photos are basically now fake. We’re way beyond a colour tweak or correcting the contrast: we’re talking about adding things to images that were never there, removing those things you don’t like, or even moving things within a photo to make it more impactful.

Welcome to the arena the Honor Magic 7 Pro, the next step in AI image manipulation. With four cameras on the rear of the phone, it’s the massive 200-megapixel telephoto that screams for your attention. It’s a 3x optical zoom with the ability to take photos out to 100x digital zoom. That’s nothing new – the OnePlus 13 will take photos at 120x – but the AI powers of this Super Zoom takes things to a level that I’ve never seen before.

Rather than just looking at your slightly grainy zoom photo and tidying it up, it does a full generative AI makeover. Snap a zoom image over 30x and with AI Super Zoom and your image will be run through Honor’s cloud servers and return looking all shiny and new.

Colours are boosted, lines are defined, tiny details that you can barely see the with naked eye suddenly jump to life. At the same time, imperfections are removed – at first glance, you have an amazing image, but look a little closer and more is revealed.

Above are two photos taken of a mountain peak over a long distance – the first is the original, the second the AI enhanced version. At first glance, the AI image is sharper, the colours are better, but look closer and you’ll see those familiar AI textures. And what’s that on the top of the hill? It looks like a dolphin…

The AI Super Zoom’s aggressive generative AI takes your photo and spits out a fake version, a photo that’s not what you saw. It’s like asking someone else to draw the contents, a frightening glimpse into a world where our reality is consumed by AI, resulting in a new level of fakery in photos.

At closer range, when there’s more to work with in a photo, the results are better, almost frighteningly good, but no less fake. My favourite Lego minifig looks fully restored with his AI Super Zoom makeover, but it looks like an cartoon version, because it’s so clean.

The Honor Magic 7 Pro will churn out these photos over and over again, using AI to replace textures, but to me, the dial has been turned too far. In the pursuit of perfection, the character of the original image is lost, it no longer looks like a zoom photo, it’s just an AI impression of that photo you snapped.

AI Super Zoom is fiddly to use – but optional

For all my criticism, you don’t have to use AI Super Zoom. It’s an option in the camera viewfinder when taking high zoom shots. And it’s a little more fiddly to use than I’d like.

Once you’ve run the zoom past 30x, the AI logo will appear in the viewfinder. You have to manually tap on that and then take your photo. It’s fiddly, because at 30x zoom and over, everything is super shaky if you’re hand-holding the phone. Every tap and every tremor moves the lens quite a bit.

As this is an AI process, it also begs the question: why do it at the point of capture? There’s no reason that I can see why you can’t opt to use this AI enhancement on your photos after the fact, a bit like Google’s own Zoom Enhance editing feature, which sits within the editing tools in Google Photos.

The Honor Magic 7 Pro isn’t just about fake zoom photos

The AI in the Magic 7 Pro offers more than just zoom. You can enhance portraits, create an “instant movie” from your video using AI, alongside Google’s Gemini and a range of AI features for search, translation, notes and so on.

But this phone is also packed with the Snapdragon 8 Elite hardware for speedy performance, it offers a impressive battery performance from what I’ve seen so far, with 100W wired and 80W wireless charging, on top of the quad camera on the rear, that will take some great photos.

I’m going to be fully reviewing the Honor Magic 7 Pro over the next couple of weeks to really get into the heart of this phone and its performance. The first impressions from the hardware are good, but I can’t help feeling that the AI enhanced zoom takes things just a little too far.