Huawei Honor 5C detailed review

A few months back, when we reviewed the Honor 5X, there were a number of aspects that we did not entirely appreciate. The device had notable stutters, the camera was not class-leading, and even its overall build quality, despite being all-metal, was nothing worth majorly appreciating. Quite a few months have passed since then, and budget smartphones raised the bar beyond what was seen before, with the likes of Xiaomi Redmi Note 3 and LeEco Le 2 leading the rise.

The Honor 5C here is testament to the improvement, and the effort that brands are now putting behind making value-for-money devices that are more than worthy of being recommended. In stark comparison to the Honor 5X, Huawei’s Honor 5C now presents a better metal build, a slightly different design, and a lot more worth being talked about. Let’s look at Huawei’s latest budget smartphone, the Honor 5C, in more detail.

Build and Design
The Honor 5C essentially uses a similar build chassis, but with a different design statement that feels refreshing in face of the competition. The Honor 5C features rounded edges on the sides and the rear, making the device easy to hold. The form factor also makes it smaller than many other devices around, although the bezels around the display could have easily been slimmer, effectively making the device even smaller. It is 8.3mm in thinness, and weighs 156 grams. All of these factors combine to make the device fairly ergonomic, easy to hold and operate, although nothing about it is really noteworthy.

The quality of metal used in the build feels much better than what was used in the Honor 5X, and the striated metal panels to the top and bottom of the rear panel add to the overall design of the smartphone. The striated lines run along the sides too, which add to both design and ease of grip. The standard arrangement sees the volume rocker and power/unlock button to the right, dual-SIM tray to the left, 3.5mm audio port on top and microUSB at the bottom. The buttons offer decent feedback, and do not feel flimsy in any manner. The dual-SIM tray houses one dedicated SIM slot and one hybrid SIM and memory card slot, using which you can expand the storage by up to 128GB.

To sum up, the Honor 5C features decent build quality, a slightly different design and convenient ergonomics, all of which combine to make it a device that is easy for one-handed typing, or stowing away inside trouser pockets without having to be conscious.

Display and UI
The 5.2-inch IPS LCD display features screen resolution of 1080x1920 pixels, which is what you would expect from a budget device, these days. The display panel on the Honor 5C is amply bright, alongside being fairly sharp and vibrant. The colours do not pop, but still seem very well-balanced and optimum for viewing video content. The colours are not oversaturated here, but have a sharp, vibrant characteristic that are pleasant to view.

Brightness levels are good, and the screen remains legible under direct sunlight. The only qualm here is the lack of screen protection on the Honor 5C, which leaves it susceptible to scratches or incidental damages. The touch response is fairly decent, although there are a few missed taps and swipes every now and then. This may not affect your everyday usage, but does have an impact when you play games like Basketball and Stack.

Huawei’s EMUI v4.1 provides custom icons, no app drawer and no curated content feed, keeping the layout reasonably clean and convenient to use. There are a few small but useful tricks here, like a blur slider for your wallpaper. It may seem insignificant, but is actually a nifty addition to keep your icons prominently visible, no matter how colourful a wallpaper you choose. Overall, it is reasonably light, although even without any apps running, I never spotted more than 950MB of RAM free (more on this later.) The Honor 5C runs on Android Marshmallow, and you get all the goodness of it out-of-the-box.

Performance and Audio
The Honor 5C is powered by Huawei’s custom HiSilicon Kirin 650 SoC, which has two clusters of Cortex-A53 cores arranged in big.LITTLE architecture, clocked at 2GHz and 1.7GHz respectively. It is built using 16nm FinFET fabrication process, and is accompanied by an i5 co-processor to aid lightweight tasks, and a Mali-T830 GPU that the company claims will offer 100 percent better performance over its predecessors. The device also comes with 2GB of RAM, of which I have never spotted more than 950MB free. This is just a number, though, seeing that the device performs fairly smoothly.

Apps that you would use on a regular basis, like WhatsApp, Facebook, Snapseed, Gmail and the likes, all load without any glitch, although there is a notably consistent sluggishness with the device. It is not exactly slow, but does not offer flawlessly smooth performance that the likes of Snapdragon 650- and 652-powered devices offer in this price range. On an overall note, it is fast enough to serve your daily email, calls, notes, messaging and browsing quite easily. Browsing with Google Chrome on the Honor 5C with more than five other apps open leads to noticeable delays in switching between tabs and slightly halted scrolling.

Even when it comes to gaming, the Honor 5C fares much better than its predecessor, the Honor 5X. Performance is notably improved, and is actually quite decent for occasional gaming even with heavy games like Asphalt 8, Injustice: Gods Among Us and Dead Trigger 2. Lightweight games like Stack, Jetpack Joyride and the likes run almost without any glitch. However, with heavier games, there are sudden stutters that halter the gaming experience. The benchmarks are an apt representation of how the smartphone falls behind in terms of performance, but still retains a decent face.

Despite having only 2GB of RAM on board, the device fares reasonably well, owing to the octa-core processor and the co-processor on board to tackle lighter background tasks. The fingerprint sensor is blazing fast and very accurate, and you can even use it to scroll down the notification panel, capture a photograph or dismiss pending notifications. The added functionalities make the device more convenient on overall terms.

Call quality is good - there were no unusual or frequent network drops, and the quality of audio from the earphone is decent. Network retention is also decent, and the device retained 3G in areas where iPhones usually switch to 2G. The integrated speakers offer loud audio, although the quality of it is not one to boast of. There is no real diversity of frequency ranges, and the overall audio has a hollow, tin-like ambience to it. It may be loud, but it isn’t any portable speaker on its own.

Camera
The 13-megapixel rear camera is paired with a 5-element, f/2.0 lens to serve your primary smartphone photography needs. Huawei provides ample options to toggle around with manual and automatic presets to help finding the perfect shot. By default, it is set to complete auto shooting at 13-megapixel 4:3 resolution. For 16:9 aspect ratio of photographs, you get 10-megapixel photographs. There are separate Pro modes for shooting stills and videos, offering you manual control over metering, white balance, shutter speed, exposure compensation, ISO and focussing.

The Honor 5C shoots bright, vibrant, well-balanced and sharp photographs under daylight or amply lit conditions. Colours are reasonably close to source, the level of noise in daylight shots is very low, although the saturation levels are a tad too low in automatic modes, leading to photographs looking slightly bleak, particularly under overcast conditions. This can easily be sorted in manual shooting, but for the most part, you will find yourself shooting in instant auto, which is not too bad.

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Photographs under low light conditions, as expected, do appear slightly soft, although they fare very well with retaining originality of colours. The camera attempts to reduce the level of noise, because of which subjects appear slightly soft here. That, though, when under soft tungsten light, does add to the essence of the photographs. The camera itself, with its shutter response, seems to be a tad slow, which is the only real deterrent in an otherwise appreciable smartphone camera. It is not extremely slow, but takes more than one second to save a photograph shot in standard mode, which, in the present day, qualifies as ‘slow’.

The 8-megapixel front-facing camera fares reasonably well, too, producing reasonably sharp photographs as long as you place it under ample light. One good aspect is the in-built photo editor, which will aid selfie enthusiasts and social media shutterbugs.

Battery
The Honor 5C offers enough battery stamina for you to last your entire day of work, with more than light usage. For instance, with about 50 emails, 90 minutes of calling, plenty of messaging, 15 minutes of GPS-enabled navigation, 10 minutes of using the camera, 20 minutes of gaming, one hour of streaming music and half an hour of streaming videos, the device lasts from 10am to 9pm, and still retains about 20 percent charge after the 11-hour day out. You will ideally need to charge it every night, although you can use it for another 30 minutes of streaming music and 15 minutes of navigation, along with more emails and calls. All of this adds up to nearly a day and half of real world usage, which is quite decent a result for the Honor 5C.

Our benchmark tests suggest a screen-on duration of 9 hours, 54 minutes and 30 seconds, which itself is fairly commendable.

Bottomline
The Honor 5C is a neat, simple and easy to use smartphone, offering decent performance for the average user, a good camera, good battery life, build, design, and there is nothing about this smartphone that is majorly disappointing. At Rs. 10,999, it is a fairly decent smartphone to consider. Sure, at Rs. 11,999, you do have the LeEco Le 2 and Xiaomi Redmi Note 3, both of which happen to be better performers. The Honor 5C happens to be the more ergonomic one of these three, so if you are looking for a compact smartphone with a good display, decent performance and camera, the Honor 5C is a very good smartphone for you to consider.

Nikon D610 DSLR Camera detailed review

It feels just like yesterday that Nikon released the D600 into the Indian market, and the company’s already set the new D610 out into the wild. Many wondered why Nikon was releasing a replacement so soon, until the official specs were released and it was discovered that the D610 wasn’t even a full-fledged replacement. The reason the D610 came about was apparently the oil-spot issue that plagued the D600, which, it seems, is not the issue with the D610. The burst speed also seems to have been bumped up from 5.5 frames per second to 6 frames per second. Sports shooters are probably excited by now. However, the most notable change in the hardware of the D610 happens to be the mirrorbox, which we’ll get into in our performance section.

Build and Ergonomics
We COULD just say that it’s identical to the D600, but that would be incredibly frustrating to you. So we’re going to take some time to essentially highlight the main aspects of the D610, It has the same sturdy mag-alloy construction that we saw on the D600. The weather sealing is there, so is the pop-up flash (here’s to you Canon). The controls on the back are absolutely identical in layout as they are on the top.

We’re not sure whether it was the review units we received or just in general, but the horizontal control dials on the D610 seem to be a lot easier to work with, in that they require lesser force to move around, but worry not, for they will not spin out of control at the slightest touch. Force is still required, but just enough. But like we said, this behaviour could be specific to just the unit we received.

The camera comes in with quite a heft, but that’s just expected within the full frame territory.

Features
The D610 brings absolutely nothing new in terms of feature set to the table that the D600 already didn’t. It has the same 24.3 megapixel sensor coupled up with the same EXPEED 3 image processing chip, all out of the D600. It has the same 39 point AF system too, with 19 cross type focus points. What’s new is a more refined white balance system that should be able to render more accurate whites in difficult conditions.

The D610 does have one absolutely new part on the inside and that’s the mirrorbox. A new design helps the camera achieve a slightly faster burst rate of 6 fps compared to its predecessor, but more importantly, it gets a much better silent shooting mode. We found in our test that the silent mode on the D610 is indeed quieter, which makes the mirrorbox redesign totally justified.

As for other interesting features on the D610, the camera has the ability to control flashes wirelessly by using the on-camera flash as the commander. Also, just like its elder siblings, the D800 and the D4, the D610 is capable of spitting out uncompressed HD footage via the mini-HDMI port on the camera.

Performance
The D610 houses a 24 megapixel full frame sensor and an EXPEED 3 processor, which isn’t new in today’s rat race. We took a short road-trip to the Taj (Taj Mahal for the uninitiated) and took the D 610 with us to see how it would perform. One of the key reasons to do so was to test the AF and the dynamic range, to see whether the camera’s systems could render enough detail in the white dome of the Taj, even under the bright mid-day sun.

We arrived around 1 in the afternoon, when the sun was comfortably high. There was a palpable rush around the monument, so while we waited patiently in line to get inside the monument, we tried to capture the little eccentricities that exist around the boundary of the structure. Little domes, snaking lines of people, all lit by the noon sun made for some very interesting subjects, all bathed in a very strong contrast. These are very harsh shooting conditions and a true test of how much dynamic range you can squeeze out of a sensor, along with being a testament of just how much headroom the image files will give you in post-production. For full disclosure, we only shot in RAW because, well, JPEG sucks. You can see the images from the trip below.
 

A little bit of food and a little bit of transport, all in the name of Agra

Sights, Sounds and Signs of the Taj

The one thing that’s evident from the get go is that the images out of the D610 are incredibly sharp. The second thing that’s evident is that the sensor is particularly fond of its reds. At the Taj Mahal, we came across a lot of red stone structures and the Nikon D610 did a splendid job of not just recording the detail, but also the intricate shades of red that flowed through the ancient structures. Quite frankly, we’ve never seen reds turn out so well in any DSLR so far. Moving forth, the greens have always been a Nikon forte, so not much needs to be said about that.
 

Luscious Reds

The dynamic range on the Nikon D610 is definitely something that we should mention though. Even under the bright mid-day sun, we could easily process the RAW file to show a clear distinction between the white marble dome of the Taj Mahal and the blown out sky. Surprisingly, even though the RAW file was low in contrast, the distinction between the two was very evident. After pushing a little bit of contrast and saturation in Lightroom, we managed to get the photo to look rather good, and this is without any high-flying editing. We could have introduced the image into Photoshop and worked around with layer masks (which we might at a later point, maybe) to make it even more appealing, but we wanted to illustrate just how much of a difference even a basic setting change would make. We even managed to pull out detail in the shadow areas of some images with a very slight increase in the Blacks and Shadows levels in Lightroom.
 

The RAW files offer excellent dynamic range and a wide gamut for recovery and editing

In case you’re on the cusp of buying your first full frame DSLR and are contemplating between the D600, which will be available for much less (about Rs. 20K to Rs. 30K), and the D610, we recommend you go for the D610. There are a few simple reasons for this. For starters, there is the oil stain issue that Nikon seems to have resolved with the newer camera. Remember, Nikon hasn’t officially admitted to why the oil stain appears on the sensor, and while they did initiate a recall and have offered free cleanings to people whose sensors were affected, we don’t see why for a few thousand you’d want to get a camera that would be susceptible to breaking down and would require repair. The second thing is that the updated mirrorbox is far quieter than its predecessor. You could easily shoot live plays with the shutter set to quiet mode and do so at a whole 3 frames per second.
 

Conclusion
The Nikon D610 is not an upgrade by a long shot. In fact, it is such a minor update, that we think the oil issue must have been something very serious for Nikon to decide to release a new product altogether in order to fix it. Regardless, the D610 does everything the D600 gets right, along with a few perks of its own. However, we weren’t too happy about the fact that the D610 doesn’t allow the aperture to be changed in movie mode, something many Nikon users have been very upset about. Regardless though, the D610 is an incredibly camera to upgrade to (even as a first camera in fact) for anyone who is looking for stunning image quality. Just make sure you compliment the camera with a good lens.