Honor is preparing a technical update to the Magic8 Pro's optical zoom. The rumor doesn't specify the area affected by this improvement. But the 200-megapixel camera sensor is said to be retained. However, after the Magic7 Pro and the Magic7 RSR, is there any real interest in further improving the camera components?
In November 2025, we published our first hands-on review of the Magic7 Pro. On that occasion, we noted the efforts Honor has made to improve the smartphone's zoom. Efforts at the hardware level: a new, larger 200-megapixel sensor, better autofocus, and new telephoto lenses. And software efforts with the integration of new tools to improve the rendering of photos taken with the telephoto lens.
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Among these new tools, Honor has focused on recomposing photos taken with a zoom ratio greater than 50x with artificial intelligence. The latter brings details and reworks textures to provide “optical” quality shots, while it is a digital zoom. The Magic7 Pro is only the first of these phones producing photos with AI: the Realme GT7 Pro followed a few weeks later.
The Magic8 Pro will benefit from a new telephoto lens
And others will come. Among them is the Magic8 Pro, the presumed successor to the Magic7 Pro, which is already rumored to launch in China at the end of the year. This smartphone will logically adopt the AI-powered photo editing system taken with the periscopic telephoto zoom. But it should also benefit from a hardware update, according to a well-known Chinese leaker on the Weibo social network. This update concerns the optical zoom module in particular, without further details.
The leaker confirms that Honor has chosen to use the 200 megapixel sensor from the Magic7 Pro. The improvement therefore concerns the optical part. It remains to be seen which one. One possible hypothesis is that the Magic8 Pro has adopted the lens of the Magic7 RSR Porsche Design that we tested earlier this year. The latter benefits from a lens with 6 elements, including 1 glass and 5 plastic. Its aperture is f/1.9 and not f/2.6. And the autofocus is more efficient, giving the Magic7 RSR better macro capabilities. This is a serious avenue for improvement for the Magic8 Pro.
What's the point of improving the lens when AI already does everything?
However, regardless of the hardware improvement made to the Magic8 Pro's optical zoom, we wonder if it's really worth it. Indeed, the Magic7 Pro relies more on artificial intelligence to improve the digital zoom shots than on its hardware. So, why would you want to change lenses again?
Sure, a larger aperture would bring more brightness, sharpness, and detail to the shots. But these are already optimized by the image coprocessor's algorithms. So we doubt this hardware upgrade will have more impact than an update to the generative AI. This isn't just true for the telephoto lens, but also for the main sensor: the Magic7 Pro's portraits are also reworked with AI, as we found in our full review. So is this the future of phone photography? Certainly.
Source: Weibo
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