Tag: review

Sony PlayStation Pulse Elite Review: The PS5’s Perfect Wireless Headset

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Sony’s first-party PlayStation gaming headsets can be hit or miss. Good news! The latest version, the Pulse Elite wireless headset, is more of the former. It costs $150, can pair with multiple devices at once, and even comes with a wireless charging hanger.

This headset’s predecessor was a miss, touting 3D audio and impressive sound, but it was made from harsh, flimsy plastic, didn’t support a Bluetooth connection, and worst of all, it wasn’t even necessary to get all the benefits of 3D audio. Sony’s Tempest 3D audio system works with plenty of other headphones.

The Pulse Elite remedies many of those issues. It supports Bluetooth audio—which you can use simultaneously alongside the PlayStation Link adapter connection. The earcups are more comfortable, and the plastic is less flimsy; it just feels better all around. If that was all the Pulse Elite improved, it would be worth the extra $50 over the older model, but it’s the wireless charging hanger that cinches it for us.

Striking Design

The design aesthetic of the PS5 struck a chord when it first dropped, and since then all of the company’s accessories have followed suit. For better or worse. These headphones are probably closer to the “better” side than, say, the PS5 camera taco. The white headband extends down around the earcups, with a swoosh toward the front. The built-in mic slides out of one of the pointed white tips. It’s a striking design without looking outright silly.

There’s a soft, fabric strap inside the headband that keeps the headphones supported without weighing on the top of your head too much. The soft, plush earcups wrap around your ears, helping to isolate them without pressing too hard on the sides of your head. You can adjust each earcup up and down to find the perfect fit.

Photograph: Eric Ravenscraft

The only thing I find particularly annoying is how the earcups are attached to the headset. Each is held on by a type of ball joint that can rotate freely in any direction. In theory, this helps make sure that the earcups aren’t resting on your head at a weird angle, lightly jamming into the sides of your head. In practice, the ball joints shift a lot. There’s also a slight, almost imperceptible clicking noise as the joint shifts around. It would be imperceptible if it wasn’t right next to my ear.

This is only an issue when I am moving my head, but even slight movements result in this low but troublesome clicking noise. I tend to fidget more than most, so it might be a problem just for me, but it was annoying to have this frequent, irritating noise intermixed with what is otherwise great audio.

Sensitive Sound

The annoyance of the earcup clicking aside, these headphones sound excellent. The Pulse Elite uses planar magnetic drivers. These use a thin, flat diaphragm that’s larger than the typical dynamic drivers in most headphones you’ve probably used. They’re also more sensitive, which allows them to produce more precise, accurate sound.

The result is that, when playing games like Overwatch 2, I found it easier to hear individual sounds that typically are blurred together on other headsets. I play as the character Mercy (and occasionally as Lifeweaver), and being able to hear the subtle footsteps of a Genji or Tracer—or the less subtle footsteps of a Reaper—behind me can mean the difference between life and death. With these headphones, distinct sounds are just a little bit easier to make out.

The Pulse Elite comes with a PlayStation Link USB dongle for a low-latency wireless connection, and it can also pair simultaneously via Bluetooth. This is most helpful if you want to, say, play some music from your phone while you’re delivering packages in Death Stranding.

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March 29, 2024
Blackmagic Cinema Camera 6K Review: Finally Full Frame
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Few camera manufacturers have managed to stand out the way Blackmagic has when it comes to capturing high-quality video on a mirrorless camera. The Pocket Cinema Camera 6K Pro (dubbed PCC6K Pro) impressed me when I reviewed it a few years ago, but somehow the company’s new Cinema Camera 6K has managed to top it. With a full-frame sensor, the new L mount, and a similar $2,600 price, it’s turning my head again.

The Cinema Camera 6K is largely similar to its predecessor, with nearly identical battery life (about an hour on one 3,500-mAh battery), and it retains the intuitive controls compared to what you’ll find on most professional cameras. It lacks the built-in neutral density filters I liked in the PCC6K Pro, but the new features are worth the trade-off.

The Full-Frame Sensor Experience

The biggest upgrade to the Cinema Camera 6K is the one so important they put it right on the front of the casing: a full-frame, 36 x 24-millimeter sensor. Compared to the Super 35-mm sensor on the previous models–which, despite its name, measures 23 x 13 mm–the new model’s sensor is a significant upgrade.

Full-frame sensors are comparable in size to 35-mm film. The most prominent benefit of this is that there’s no crop factor when using most lenses. Cropped sensors result in a smaller field of view, meaning you can fit less of a scene into a frame compared to a camera with a full-frame sensor. Put simply, you need to be further away, use shorter lenses, or both to get the same image. This can often come at the expense of things like a shallow depth of field or worse low-light performance.

Putting a full-frame sensor inside one of Blackmagic’s cameras is probably the best upgrade I could’ve asked for. I often shoot videos in my apartment, and it can be difficult to get images that look good because there simply isn’t enough space in the frame to get the scene that I want. For example, below are two photos taken with a 50-mm lens, first with the PCC6K Pro and the second with the new Cinema Camera 6K; I stood in the same spot in my tiny living room. The full-frame sensor can capture significantly more of my living space. For some people like me who often have to shoot in cramped spaces, this is nothing short of a godsend.
Photograph: Eric Ravenscraft

Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 6K Pro
The new model feels just as comfortable to use as Blackmagic’s other cinema cameras. It might be a little bulky, but its chassis feels excellent whether you’re holding it with one or two hands. The autofocus is impeccable; there’s still no autofocus tracking nor in-body image stabilization (IBIS), but with the handy focus button next to the left thumb, I find it easy to land the focus directly on my subject. The whole thing can be heavy, especially if you use it with Blackmagic’s optional battery grip, but this is still my favorite design for everything from the studio to run-and-gun shoots.

Low-Light Performance

With a bigger sensor comes larger pixels that can capture more light. Compared to the sensor on the previous 6K Pro, the full-frame sensor has nearly three times as much surface area, but the same 6K resolution. That means that each pixel is capturing almost three times as much light for each pixel in the image.

The result is that the new Cinema Camera 6K performs even better in low-light conditions than the already impressive model that came before it. Here are two photos, one with the previous 6K Pro, and one with the new Cinema Camera 6K. Both cameras were set to an ISO of 400, at an ƒ/3 aperture, and 1/30 shutter speed. They were also captured from the same position, although I cropped the full-frame photo to a comparable area of the 6K Pro.
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March 26, 2024
DJI Air 3 Drone Review: Serious Video Chops

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DJI’s drones dominate the market to such an extent that you barely hear any other brands mentioned. They’re not quite competing with themselves, but the DJI Air 3 does fill a gap between the professional-grade Mavic series and the pocket-size Mini range. It’s the first new Air model since 2021’s Air 2S, and DJI has done it again, with a drone that offers enhanced video performance and mercifully stress-free flying.

I’ve been flying the DJI Air 3 for the past few months, comparing it with a range of other drones, including its main competitor, the superb Air 2S. The biggest improvement over its older cousin is a multi-camera setup previously exclusive to the much pricier Mavic models, but there are notable boosts to battery life and flight safety too.

Twice as Nice

The headline feature for the DJI Air 3 is the two cameras mounted on its front gimbal. There’s a “standard” wide-angle camera offering a 24-mm-equivalent field of view (broadly similar to the camera on the Air 2S) and a medium-telephoto camera offering a 70-mm-equivalent field of view. The latter gives the drone a brand-new creative option, with the angle allowing for a narrower framing of smaller subjects and the ability to isolate them against the background in an all-new, dramatic way. A tighter field of view might not sound all that exciting, but in practice it’s a significant upgrade.

Photograph: DJI

Both cameras use a 1/1.3-inch Quad Bayer CMOS sensor with 48-megapixel resolution. What I like about these sensors is that they both capture video at the same quality, making it easier to give footage a unified, harmonious look when editing, no matter which parts were captured by which camera.

The DJI Air 2S had a single 1-inch 20-megapixel sensor, which might make the Air 3’s smaller 1/1.3-inch sensors sound a little disappointing. But it doesn’t feel like too much of a loss. I understand DJI’s justification; two larger sensors would add weight and take up space. But all told, I think the image quality is better on the Air 3, with wider dynamic range and less noise.

The Air 3 does lose the ability to record video at a 5.7K resolution, being restricted to 4K on both cameras, but in all honesty, I don’t think anybody will mind all that much. For the majority of casual users, 4K will be more than enough detail.

4K can be captured at up to 60 frames per second in the standard video mode, 100 fps in slow-motion mode, and 30 fps in the new night mode, which ekes out extra detail after the sun goes down. I found the flat D Log M color profile a joy too, as it let me do my own color grading and correction in postproduction and achieve the results I wanted.

Photos (which can be captured in JPEG or DNG RAW) look excellent too, and while the Air 3 can’t match the WIRED-recommended Mavic 3’s Four Thirds Hasselblad camera, it’s not far off, while being smaller and substantially cheaper.

Photograph: Sam Kieldsen

DJI Air 3. Still image shot using the wide angle 24mm equivalent camera.

Fly Safer for Longer

Buzzing around the beaches and headlands of Britain’s southeast coast, I found the Air 3 to be even more forgiving and enjoyable to fly than its (already forgiving and enjoyable) predecessor. This is thanks to a bigger battery (46 minutes as opposed to the Air 2S’s 31—although real-world use numbers are marginally lower for both drones) and a full omnidirectional anti-collision sensor setup that makes crashes very unlikely. The Air 3 now has sensors facing forwards, backwards, upwards, downwards, and laterally on both the left and right sides, and in good light these will spot hazards and stop your drone from careering into them. These sensors become less reliable the darker the conditions are, but it’s an invaluable feature that could save your blushes and bank balance.

Like all DJI drones, the Air 3’s flight controls are wonderfully intuitive and loaded with practical automated functions. For instance, you can tap a button on the controller to take off, and another to bring the drone back from wherever it is and land. You can also define waypoints for fully automated flight, and set the Air 3 to track a static or moving subject, keeping its cameras trained on it at all times.

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March 24, 2024
Keychron Q5 Pro and Q6 Pro Review: Well-Built Full-Size Keyboards

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I’ve spent the last few weeks with the Keychron Q5 Pro and Q6 Pro mechanical keyboards, and I think they’re some of the best bang-for-your-buck full-size keyboards you can get today. The Q6 Pro is a traditional full-size keyboard layout with a NumPad and navigation keys, while the Q5 Pro is a slightly more compact 1800-style layout.

Both of them are gasket-mounted, with thick aluminum cases and a knob in the top right corner. You can buy either model with Keychron’s red linear switches, brown tactile switches, or banana tactile switches, and they include hot-swap sockets, RGB lighting, and Bluetooth 5.1 connectivity by default. If you don’t mind a cord, you can also connect them via USB-C. (Read my guide, How to Shop for a Mechanical Keyboard, if you want to learn more about some of these terms!)

Why a Full-Size Layout?

Anyone who wants a full-size keyboard layout already knows they want it. In my experience, it’s something you’re already acclimated to, not something you’re going to switch to on a whim. These things are huge and can have a dedicated key for everything, especially if you take advantage of the ability to reprogram keys.

The bare-bones version of the Q6 Pro allows you to add your preferred set of switches and keycaps.

Photograph: Keychron

Yes, the entire keyboard is completely reprogrammable. Keychron’s Q Pro line supports QMK/VIA, an open source third-party software that lets you reprogram every key. QMK is a system for keyboards that allows users to flash new firmware and keymaps, and VIA is a system that makes this reprogramming quick and seamless within a web browser. These keymaps persist across devices and have nearly limitless potential once you’ve learned the software.

Because of the utility of QMK and VIA, I found the number pads useful even though I hardly ever use them to input numbers. They can easily be reprogrammed and used as a dedicated macro pad, or for any other number of uses. (It’s worth noting that with both QMK and VIA, you have to plug in the keyboard to reprogram it.) The placement of the reset button underneath the spacebar on the top of the printed circuit board (PCB) makes reprogramming easy, since you don’t have to take the entire keyboard apart (unlike quite a few other keyboards that place the button in a hard-to-reach spot).

Even if you don’t plan to reprogram any keys, the number pad is great for quickly typing long strings of numbers or if you want to utilize Alt Codes so that you don’t have to constantly Google “Em dash” and copy and paste the symbol on Windows. (Hot tip: The Alt code for an em dash is Alt + 0151.)

The Typing Feel

Both the Q5 Pro and Q6 Pro use a gasket mount, meaning the main keyboard assembly (plate, switches, PCB) is suspended inside the case using two compressed layers of foam instead of being directly attached to the case. This creates a bouncier typing feel and isolates the internal assembly to create a softer, more crisp typing sound.

Keychron’s gasket-mount system is fairly bouncy, meaning the key presses feel soft and relaxed. This meshes with the switches provided, which have fairly light springs, to create an overall typing experience that’s crisp and bouncy without feeling cheap or flimsy.

The two boards I received have the Red and Banana switches from Keychron’s K Pro switch line. The Reds are simple, effective linear switches that sound poppy and feel fairly smooth. The Banana switches are tactile with a medium-strength bump and a good amount of travel after the bump. I’d recommend either one since both are high-quality examples of their respective switch types that will be acceptable to a large number of users.

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March 23, 2024
DJI Mini 4 Pro Drone Review: The Best Small Drone Available

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Even as a relatively experienced pilot, I love how difficult it is to to crash a DJI drone. This is thanks to its full omnidirectional vision sensor array, which is drone jargon for sensors facing forwards, backwards, downwards, upwards, and to both sides. It’s the first time this level of disaster avoidance tech has been seen on an ultralight DJI drone, and I love it. If the Mini 4 Pro senses an imminent collision it will stop immediately in the sky. You’ll struggle to even deliberately crash this drone, which is just as it should be.

These sensors also allow the drone to circumvent obstacles when using its autopilot-like ActiveTrack 360 system. Just draw a box around an object—a boat or car for instance—on the controller’s touchscreen and the Mini 4 Pro will autonomously follow it as it moves around, keeping it framed in the camera. I found it useful for making cinematic shots of me riding my bike, and also, impressively, keeping pace with a speedboat through the wake, and it was reassuring to know that the Mini 4 Pro had the brains to stay safe as it tracked.

The vision system isn’t totally foolproof, though. It doesn’t work when flying the drone in its fastest, most responsive Sport setting, which is fair enough, but you’ll also have to exercise some additional care after dark.

Night Moves

But it’s worth brushing up on your sundown flying skills, however, thanks to the significant upgrades lavished on the gimbal-stabilized camera. The Mini 4 Pro has the same 1/1.3-inch 48-megapixel Quad Bayer image sensor as the Mini 3 Pro, but processing has been greatly improved. It now matches the Mini 3 Pro’s 4K/60-frames-per-second performance but can also capture super-smooth slow motion in 4K at 100 fps.

Even better, it now has the option to record 10-bit D-Log M video, allowing for greater grading potential in postproduction. I’m still learning when it comes to color grading and correction of drone footage, but I was able to turn my 10-bit aerial footage into something really dynamic and engaging. It’s definitely the best footage I’ve ever seen from an ultralight drone, even if it doesn’t quite hit the levels of detail offered by the larger sensors on the likes of the DJI Mavic 3 or Air 3.

Photograph: Sam Kielsden

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March 23, 2024
Elegoo Saturn 3 Ultra 12K Review: Resin Printing Made Easy (and Big)

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I’m a huge fan of resin 3D printers. While the liquid resin can be a little harder to work with than typical filament printers, the results are often much more detailed and look better. However, there are some limitations to the Elegoo Mars 3 that I used in the past. Things like its small print bed, or making sure it’s properly ventilated because resin printing can be toxic, mean I don’t turn to it as often as I’d like. The new Elegoo Saturn 3 Ultra, on the other hand, fixes all of these problems and more.

What I love most about resin printing is that it enables me to be an even bigger nerd. I have friends who play a lot of D&D, and I like to make minifigs for them. When I make costumes for Dragon Con, I find it easiest to print a lot of the accessories or details that I don’t have the skills to craft myself out of other materials like foam. With the larger print size and a better filtering system, the Saturn 3 Ultra 12K made my dreams of making nerdy stuff a more convenient reality.

Printing Space Galore

The biggest advantage of the Elegoo Saturn 3 Ultra 12K compared to other comparable 3D printers is just how much space you have to print. My Mars 3 has a build volume of 153.36 mm x 77.76 mm x 175 mm. That’s just under 7 inches tall, with a roughly 6- by 3-inch print bed. That’s good enough for printing D&D miniatures, small trinkets, or board game pieces. But it can get really restrictive if you want to do much that’s larger than that.

Photograph: Eric Ravenscraft

The Saturn 3 Ultra, on the other hand, has a positively massive 218.88 mm × 122.88 mm × 260 mm build volume. That means the print bed itself is around 8.6 inches by 4.8 inches, with a whopping 10.2 inches of height. Put more simply, the size of objects you can build is more than triple that of the Mars 3.

You might not think a couple of extra inches would matter, but it makes all the difference in the world. The printer came in handy when my partner wanted a prop for her Suzume costume. In this movie, the main character teams up with an animate children’s chair (just go with it) with a very distinct look.

We considered a number of ways to recreate this character. We could build it out of wood (we had no woodworking tools), we could make it out of foam (probably the smartest option, but we wanted it to be durable enough to survive a convention), or I could 3D-print some pieces and glue them all together. But the Mars 3 only had enough space to make a teeeeeny tiny version. And that’s not what my partner wanted.

The Saturn 3 Ultra came to the rescue. With a little finagling, I was able to fit every single piece of the chair–the back, the base, three long legs and two small supporting rods–into a single print. The whole print took about 14 long hours–the base of the chair was stretching the limits of that super tall print volume–but in the end, I was able to make all the parts needed for my partner’s costume companion with maybe a half hour of fiddling in 3D software, and a day of waiting for a print to finish.

Photograph: Eric Ravenscraft

Attention to Detail

Resin printers are so appealing because they can recreate detail that filament-based printers struggle with. They use ultraviolet light, projected through a digital display, to cure only the parts of a pool of liquid resin that are necessary for the print. And the screen in the base of the Saturn 3 Ultra 12 has a truly absurd level of detail.

The 12K in this printer’s full name refers to exactly the same thing it means in TVs. Your 4K TV has four thousand (roughly) lines of horizontal resolution. Likewise, the LCD screen in the Saturn 3 Ultra has a resolution of 11,520 x 5,120. When packed into a 10-inch display, it means the printer can create models with detail on a scale measured in tens of micrometers.

In practice, that means the Saturn 3 Ultra can make some incredibly intricate models. Elven castles and figurines with complex details like dragon scales are perfect for this device. But one of the most impressive models I printed was this set of epaulets from the show The Orville.

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March 22, 2024
Hasselblad 907X 100C Review: Digital Smarts With a Film Soul

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Hasselblad’s new 100-megapixel medium-format camera system is capable of truly stunning images and totally incapable of shooting video. This is a photographer’s camera, for those lucky enough to still be photographers, without the demanding video workload tacked on to every job. If that’s you—and you have plenty of cash to spare—this is the camera you want.

The CFV 100C is a new 100-megapixel digital back that will pair with both Hasselblad’s 907X digital body (the smallest medium format camera on the market) and older 501c Hasselblads. Throw in an optional grip and you have a medium-format digital camera system that can be used like an old Hasselblad film camera (shooting waist level), as a more versatile digital version using the flip screen, or for more traditional SLR-style shooting with the grip.

Second to None

Like most photographers, I do not have a Hasselblad 501c just lying about, so I did all my testing using the 907X with the CFV 100C. This combo is incredibly compact, comfortable to shoot with at both waist level and eye level, plus easy to carry around. The 907X portion of the rig is thin, little more than something that connects an XCD series lens to the 100C sensor back. The brains and sensor of the package are in the new CFV 100C digital back.

The 100-megapixel medium-format sensor is the same one Hasselblad used in the X2D (7/10, WIRED Review), and it remains mind-blowing. Not only is the resolution extremely detailed, but the RAW files capture 15 stops of dynamic range and 16-bit color, offering some of the best color rendering I’ve ever seen in a digital sensor. It’s difficult to quantify exactly what it is that makes these files special, but I rarely felt the need to edit them. They already look the way I want. Naturally, this will be up to photographic style and personal taste, but for me at least, Hasselblad’s color and tone rendering—even in JPG files—is second to none.

Photograph: Scott Gilbertson

They are huge files, though. Be forewarned that the RAW files are around 200 megabytes each, and even JPGs can be up in the high 80-MB range. Like the X2D, this camera includes a 1-terabyte drive and a CFexpress card slot to expand that storage capacity even more.

The sensor and storage are the same as the DSLR-style X2D, but the 907X 100C has nothing else in common. The X2D feels like using a high-resolution Nikon. Combine that with the lack of video features—which I would prefer to have in a more DSLR form factor—and the X2D fell flat for me. The 907X with the 100C is the polar opposite, despite sharing the same sensor. This is the camera Hasselblad fans have been dreaming of. It’s everything that made the film Hasselblads special, with a digital soul. It might not last as long as the film cameras (electronics being finicky, after all), but in every other way, it carries that Hasselblad tradition.

That’s not to say there aren’t modern improvements here. Autofocus, a place where even recent Hasselblads have struggled, is much better. There’s face detection (no, not eye, just face), which works quite well in all settings but very low light. I would prefer eye detection, but this works in most situations. I prefer manual focusing most of the time.

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March 22, 2024
IQ Air Atem X Review: High-End Air Purifier

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As for sound, it’s the most powerful and quietest air purifier I’ve tested. The maximum setting has a published ultrafine particle removal rate of 650 cubic meters per hour. (This is the measure of how fast and effectively an air purifier removes dust.)

According to my certificate of testing, at its highest setting the Atem X maxes out at 63 decibels, which is slightly higher than conversational speech in a restaurant, or from an air conditioner. At half that fan speed, the Atem X effectively cleans at a rate of 326 m³/h, well above its published rate of 250. It’s also one decibel above a bird call at 45 dB. It’s barely noticeable. Several times I put my hand over the grille to feel for airflow. I wasn’t sure whether it was on.

An HVAC Replacement

While it’s true that my 135-year-old Brooklyn apartment is not the Berkeley Laboratory, it is the perfect location to test a consumer air cleaner. Aside from my two cats and a dog, there’s my close proximity to the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, a constant source of gasoline fumes that produce the cancer-causing volatile organic compound benzene as well as particulate matter.

My apartment also has vintage steam radiators. That viral tweet, “The hottest summer I ever spent was a winter in a New York City apartment,” is true. That’s by design. The steam radiator system was intended to keep the apartment warm when you open the windows for airflow. Fresh air is healthy … on good air days, at least.

Like many of my neighbors apartments, mine won’t be retrofitted with an HVAC system complete with MERV filters to clean my air anytime soon. What happens when the air outside is toxic? I rely on portable air cleaners, especially at times like last spring, when New York City turned orange with heavy PM 2.5 from wildfires in Canada. At one point that day, New York had the worst air quality on Earth, with an index of 218. For context, Mumbai has the worst air as I’m writing this at 182. New York mayor Eric Adams said out loud what we were all thinking that day: “I went outdoors and basically said, you know, What the hell is this?”

The fact that it’s quiet—rustling-leaves quiet—on its lower settings makes the Atem X an ideal investment for those without a central HVAC system with MERV filters, which are those pleated 1-inch-thick square filters that fit into a furnace or central air system. (MERV filters can also cover a box fan to make an inexpensive DIY air purifier.)

What doesn’t the Atem X do? Unlike IQAir’s GS Series or the Dyson Pure Hot+Cool, the Atem X doesn’t have a carbon filter and cannot clear the air of odor, gases, or volatile organic compounds, like benzene. The Atem X uses a hyperHEPA filter, which captures all the tiny but potentially deadly stuff, like viruses such as Covid-19, bacteria, and PM 2.5. That designer cleaning has a cost: A replacement filter four-pack costs $199.

It’s been over four years since the world went into lockdown and indoor air quality became a main character. In a few short decades, we went from a society that smoked on airplanes to wearing KN95 masks in business class and coach. The minimalist white disc that IQAir says is “made in Germany with love” might signal a new way to think about air filters, a statement piece that brings the room together in a burning world. Even with the Atem X’s price tag, I would buy one. It’s playing the long game, a well-made handsome air filter made to go the distance.

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March 21, 2024
Honor Magic 6 Pro Review: Innovative but Inconsistent

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The Honor Magic 6 Pro is a strange phone. It folds innovative new AI features, secure 3D face unlock, cutting-edge battery tech, and a powerful camera into an expensively sleek body. But the MagicOS software is buggy, the camera is inconsistent, and it’s one of the most expensive Android phones on the market. (It’s also not officially available in the US.)

While the Honor Magic 6 Pro has delighted and impressed me over the past couple of weeks, it has also frustrated and confused me. It can be oh-so-slick one minute and trip up the next. So is it smoke and mirrors or innovative magic? The answer seems to be a bit of both. If you crave innovation and don’t mind a few quirks, the Honor Magic 6 Pro delivers.

Now With More AI

At the launch, Honor talked up the AI-powered features in the Magic 6 Pro, a lot. We tried Honor’s eye-tracking at MWC, where my colleague glanced at commands in an Alfa Romeo app to start and stop the car and even have it drive forward and back. When this rolls out, it will let you do slightly more mundane things, like expand a notification with a glance when your hands are full.

While eye-tracking is not available yet, there were a couple of AI features I played with for my review. Magic Text lets you quickly extract text from an image. If there’s a phone number in there, you can tap to dial it. You can also drag and drop extracted text into another app. So far, so handy.

With Magic Portal, you can touch and drag content, such as a passage of text, an image, or a screenshot, over to the right and drop it into another app, like Gmail or Notes. The screen you are in folds away, and a vertical row of possible apps appears on the right as you hover. It can be useful for stuff like addresses, which you can drag into Maps for directions. It looks super slick, but I’m not sure how often you’ll remember to use it.

These new features hint at how much more important AI will become on our phones. It’s worth noting that they are processed on-device using Honor’s MagicLM, its very own large language model. Honor is also working on a new AI-powered tool that can use your photos and text prompts to generate video, which sounds intriguing and leads us neatly to the other headline feature of the Magic 6 Pro: the camera.

Classy Camera

Crazy-big, powerful cameras are all the rage in China’s flagship phones (see the Xiaomi 14 Ultra, Oppo Find X7 Ultra, and Nubia Z60 Ultra). The Honor Magic 6 Pro is no exception. It has a 50-megapixel main lens with a variable aperture (f/1.4 to f/2.0), a 180-megapixel periscope telephoto lens that offers 2.5X optical zoom but goes up to 100X digitally, and a 50-megapixel ultrawide. Around the front is a 50-megapixel camera paired with a 3D depth camera in a central pill-shaped cutout at the top of the screen.

The telephoto lens is easily my favorite thing about the camera. While it technically only supports 2.5X optical zoom, it can achieve 5X lossless zoom by cropping shots from the 180-megapixel lens. The 5X zoom shots I took with the Magic 6 Pro are my favorites, capturing bags of detail and realistic colors. The main camera is also solid, with impressive dynamic range, depth of field, and good low-light performance.

Color inconsistencies and some weird processing mar an otherwise excellent camera. The weakest link is the ultrawide, which lacks the optical image stabilization present in the other lenses, sometimes stretches the edges of shots, goes overboard with smoothening, and dials the color vibrancy way up. The color matching across the trio is generally poor, and the processing is sometimes heavy-handed, ironing out the noise but veering into oil painting territory, particularly if you zoom in beyond 5X.

You can record smooth video in 4K at up to 60 frames per second with any of the main camera lenses. The autofocus is swift, and there’s a Movie mode option for a more cinematic feel. There’s also a Pro mode in the camera if you want to shoot RAW or dig deeper into the settings. Selfies taken with the front-facing camera are above average, and it can also capture 4K video, though it tops out at 30 fps. The Honor Magic 6 Pro can snap lovely photos, but I had to delete misfires a little too often.

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March 21, 2024
Apple Vision Pro Review: A Little Too Far Out

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Worse is when the doorbell goes off while you’re in the Vision Pro and you have to suddenly take it off to run downstairs and answer the door. Contrary to what Apple might want, I find it odd to just keep wearing the headset as I move through my home.

Just the other day I was installing a smart thermostat and I thought it would be helpful to wear the headset and place the installation’s video walkthrough in a virtual space next to the thermostat so I didn’t have to keep going back to my phone. Then I thought about having to wear the Vision Pro and look through the passthrough screen, which sometimes resembles a 720p display. Oh and the fact that there’s no official YouTube app yet (there is a third-party option). I just watched the video on my phone instead.

My wife doesn’t like it when I’m wearing the Vision Pro. She says it makes me “very unapproachable,” and even though Apple has a feature called EyeSight that simulates your eyes on the exterior screen of the headset, she says it’s difficult to notice it. When she does, “It feels like I’m looking at your eyes through a screensaver.” I might be enjoying my time in the headset, but it’s isolating for her.

I can go on and on. It’s surprisingly bulky to stuff in a backpack, not to mention the travel case Apple sells is $199 and adds even more bulk. It’s silly that the Zeiss prescription inserts cost so much, and that there’s no way to set up a second user’s profile in case someone else in the household wants to use it. (There’s just a rudimentary guest mode.) I also don’t love the faint glare on the lens that seems to only appear when you’re watching a movie or show in a dark setting.

Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

Most of all, I’m not sure about how Apple is positioning the Vision Pro. Should the future of computing be a bulky headset strapped to our heads that isolates us from the real world? Should I walk around my home capturing spatial video of my dog all the time? Or have conversations with my wife as she stares at my digital eyes? I am sure a loyal Apple and VR fanbase is loving every minute inside the Vision Pro, but I fear the simplest barrier of having to wear a bulky thing on the head is enough to put off the vast majority of consumers.

Yes, the Vision Pro is very much a first-gen product and one that’s not really intended for the general public—it’s more like a public developer kit. Naturally, components will get smaller, the technology will improve, and hopefully, the price will go down. The hardware is monumental, and the capabilities of the Vision Pro are incredibly impressive. But I think we are quite a ways away from the future Apple is envisioning.

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March 20, 2024