HONOR Magic9 Pro Max · ARRI's cinema colour, two 200 MP cameras and 8,800 mAh

HONOR has launched no plain Magic9 Pro, so the Pro Max is the Magic8 Pro's successor. Compared on the Chinese models:

The upgrade is real where it counts for this phone: a much better main camera, a brighter screen and a far bigger battery. What you give up is a little zoom, 20 W of wired charging and 14 g, which is a fair trade unless the Magic8 Pro's weight was the reason you chose it.

ARRI makes the Alexa cinema cameras, and the Magic9 series puts its colour pipeline into the phone's recording itself rather than into a filter. HONOR's Robot Phone was the first to record in ARRI LogC3 in August; the Magic9 series brings it to HONOR's mainstream flagships. In ARRI CINEMA Mode the Pro Max records up to 4K at 60 fps in ARRI LogC3 with 10-bit colour and ARRI Wide Gamut 3. In plain words, the footage comes out flat and grey on purpose, keeping detail in the highlights and shadows so it can be graded later, and a colourist can treat it like footage from an ARRI camera. Early accounts say even the most basic conversion Look clears away the oversharpening and boosted saturation of the phone's default video mode. For people who will never open an editor, 14 ARRI Looks come preinstalled (two conversion Looks and twelve stylised ones), and the full library of 87 can be downloaded from honor.com or arri.com and imported.

Cinematic LiveVideo is the everyday version of the same idea: the phone records a 2.39:1 widescreen clip, at up to 4K, that runs on for three seconds after you press the shutter. HONOR claims it as an industry first, and it is the feature most buyers will actually use.

Under it sits HONOR's own H1 imaging chip, a 6 nm part that runs noise reduction on the raw sensor data before the image is processed. HONOR quotes an 8 dB better signal-to-noise ratio and up to 14 stops of dynamic range from its own tests, figures we cannot check yet. The Pro Max adds the sound side: a directional microphone that focuses on what the camera is pointed at, within ±60° of the lens, so a voice or a guitar in front of you is not drowned out by the crowd around you. It records with four microphones in total, and early accounts say the voice isolation mode keeps a speaker clear of wind and traffic even from about 3 m away, at the cost of a slightly processed sound.

The Magic9 is not a cut-down phone. It keeps the dual 200 MP layout, the ARRI pipeline, the H1 chip, the 10,000-nit peak, the 55 MP front camera and IP68, IP69 and IP69K sealing against immersion and high-pressure, hot water jets, in a body of 151 × 72.28 × 8.49 mm and 209 g. That makes it one of the very few compact phones with a flagship camera, and its 8,000 mAh battery is the largest of any compact phone we cover.

The ¥1,500 difference between the two starting prices buys the Pro Max's newer Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 instead of the 8 Elite Gen 5, a 6.8-inch LTPO panel with the anti-reflective coating, and bigger camera sensors: the main camera goes from 1/1.4-inch at f/1.9 to 1/1.28-inch at f/1.57, the telephoto becomes a periscope on a larger 1/1.4-inch sensor, and both are rated CIPA 8.0 against 7.5. It also gets the directional microphone, autofocus on the ultra-wide, 3D face unlock, eSIM, a bigger battery and faster wired and wireless charging. The Magic9 has a glass back where the Pro Max is a metal unibody.

The Pro Max's 8,800 mAh is the biggest battery of any phone we cover, and it fits in a body 8.59 mm thick. That is possible thanks to a silicon-carbon anode with an energy density of 1,000 Wh/L. The rated capacity is 8,600 mAh. The Magic9 reaches 8,000 mAh with up to 25% silicon.

Charging is fast on both: 100 W wired and 80 W wireless on the Pro Max, and 80 W and 50 W on the Magic9. Both share power the other way too: 27 W reverse wired, enough to top up another phone properly, plus reverse wireless for earbuds or a watch, for which HONOR gives no wattage. Chinese boxes include the charger.

The Pro Max is among the first phones on Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6. Qualcomm claims 13% more CPU, 44% more GPU and 35% more NPU performance than the 8 Elite Gen 5 in the Magic9, though that older chip is hardly slow. Both phones also carry HONOR's third-generation C3 radio chip, meant to hold a signal in crowded or weak-coverage places.

Both phones peak at 10,000 nits, the highest figure in our catalog by a wide margin; the next brightest phone we list, HONOR's own Robot Phone, claims 6,800. Peak figures are measured on a small patch, so the more useful numbers are 2,000 nits full-screen on both and 6,000 nits at 20% of the screen on the Pro Max. The Pro Max's 6.8-inch LTPO OLED runs at 1–120 Hz and its coating reflects as little as 1.5% of incoming light, which matters more for reading in sun than any peak figure. The Magic9's 6.37-inch OLED runs at up to 120 Hz with 0.95 mm bezels. Both dim with high-frequency PWM, at 4,320 Hz on the Pro Max and 3,840 Hz on the Magic9, which keeps flicker down at low brightness.

The camera module, which HONOR calls the Director's Eye on both phones, takes its cue from the three-lens turret of ARRI's ARRIFLEX film cameras.

HONOR sells two clip-on lenses for the telephoto. The G200 weighs about 88 g and turns the 85 mm telephoto into a 200 mm lens, and the G500 reaches 500 mm: far enough to fill the frame with a bird on a branch or a player across a pitch without digital cropping. HONOR quotes a combined equivalent range of 200 to 5,400 mm with the accessories. A SmallRig video cage and an imaging grip complete the kit. The Camera Master Suit bundles both teleconverters, the grip, a strap and a bag with a 16 GB + 1 TB Pro Max in Shadow Black for ¥10,999 (≈ €1,432). The Magic9 has its own version of the G200.

Without accessories, the Pro Max's telephoto reaches 3.5× optically and up to 200× digitally, the Magic9's 120× digitally.

Both phones launch on MagicOS 11, based on Android 17. The most practical addition is reach beyond HONOR: tap-to-share now works with OPPO, vivo, Xiaomi and Apple devices as well as Insta360 cameras, a first according to HONOR. The YOYO assistant gains a memory (YOYO Memory) and one-press capture of video highlights. HONOR has not published a software update commitment for the series.

Both phones are on sale in China; HONOR dates the Pro Max's sales from launch day, 28 September. The Magic9 costs ¥4,999 for 12 GB + 256 GB, ¥5,499 for 12 GB + 512 GB, ¥5,999 for 16 GB + 512 GB and ¥6,999 for 16 GB + 1 TB, roughly €651 to €911 or $746 to $1,045. China's national subsidy brings the entry model to ¥4,499. The Magic9 Pro Max costs ¥6,499, ¥6,999, ¥7,499 and ¥8,499 for the same four tiers, roughly €846 to €1,107 or $970 to $1,269, and HONOR's store shows no subsidised price for it. Imported into a market where HONOR does not sell it, the phone picks up customs duty and local VAT, so the real price outside China is noticeably higher.

The Magic9 comes in Popcorn Yellow, Olive Green, Curtain Black and Prologue White, the Pro Max in Moss Green, Shadow Black and Glacier Silver. HONOR's global press release says rollouts in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, South-East Asia and other markets "will be announced shortly", but only for the Pro Max. HONOR does not sell phones in the US.