It’s been a busy week for Chinese camera flagships. Vivo kicked things off with the video-focused X500 Pro Max, Oppo followed with the triple 200MP Find X10 Pro Max, and Xiaomi arrived a day later with the 18 Pro Max. Honor is the latest to jump on the bandwagon with the Magic 9 Pro Max, and it brings some of the camera capabilities the company developed in collaboration with ARRI to its quirky robot phone.
Two 200MP cameras in ARRI cinema color
The Magic 9 Pro Max has a 200MP main camera with a 1/1.28 inch sensor, an f/1.57 aperture, and OIS. It’s paired with a 200MP telephoto with a 1/1.4-inch sensor and an f/2.6 aperture, plus a 50MP ultrawide. Honor followed the same basic formula as the Xiaomi 18 Pro Max, but the Magic 9 Pro Max has an advantage when it comes to stabilization. Both of its 200MP cameras carry a CIPA 8.0 rating, a step above the CIPA 7.0 rating Xiaomi and Vivo quote for their latest models. Its main camera also offers 3-degree gimbal-level stabilization.
Like Vivo, Honor is betting big on video performance with its latest flagship. The phone gets the same ARRI Cinema mode that the company introduced on the robot phone, support for recording in the ARRI LogC3 curve with 10-bit color, and the ARRI Wide Gamut 3 color space. Honor has also baked in 14 preset ARRI Looks, with a total of 87 available through the ARRI Look Library.
Honor also has some creator-focused accessories to go with the Magic 9 Pro Max, including a SmallRig mobile video kit and two teleconverters, the G200 and G500. The device includes a 55MP selfie shooter paired with a 3D depth-sensing camera on the front, along with a four-microphone array that handles directional audio during recording.
An 8,800mAh battery is the flagship of this season
The Magic 9 Pro Max packs Qualcomm’s flagship Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6, the same chip in the Xiaomi 18 Pro Max. Honor has paired it with its own H1 imaging chip and up to 16GB of RAM and 1TB of storage. On the software front, the device runs MagicOS 11 based on Android 17.
The battery is where Honor clearly pulls ahead, offering a massive 8,800mAh cell that beats the 8,500mAh unit in the Xiaomi 18 Pro Max, the 8,000mAh unit in the Oppo Find X10 Pro Max, and the 7,800mAh unit in the Vivo X500 Pro Max. Charging is at 100W wireless and 80W wireless. This wireless figure also beats all three rivals by a wide margin, but you need Honor’s own SuperCharge wireless charger to beat that speed. Despite the large battery, the phone measures just 8.59 mm thick and weighs 233g.
Its 6.8-inch LTPO OLED display has a 1320 x 2868 resolution, a 1-120Hz refresh rate, a claimed peak brightness of 10,000 nits, and 4,320Hz PWM dimming. It also has an anti-reflective coating to reduce glare. The phone is rated IP68, IP69, and IP69K for dust and water resistance, and comes in Shadow Black, Glacier Silver, and Moss Green.
The Honor Magic 9 Pro Max is priced at 6,499 RMB (~$968) for the base 16GB + 256GB variant and goes up to 8,499 RMB (~$1,266) for the top-end 16GB + 1TB model. Honor has yet to share pricing and availability details for international markets.