nubia Red Magic 9 Pro review

New dual 50MP camera setup

The Red Magic 9 Pro sports a fairly new main camera sensor - it's the same one from the previous two generations 8 Pro, but it's a huge upgrade over the older Red Magic generations. The handset now uses a Samsung GN5 50MP ISOCELL sensor. It's 1/1.57" in size with 1.0µm pixels, and it's paired with an f/1.9 lens. The only difference is the addition of OIS to the main cam.

The ultrawide finally gets an upgrade and is now Samsung JN1 50MP ISOCELL 1/2.76", 0.64µm sensor coupled with f/2.2 aperture.

The macro shooter remains the same - 2MP f/2.4, so no changes here.

The under-display selfie camera hasn't changed either - 16MP OV16E1Q sensor, 1/2.8" in size and is paired with f/2.0 aperture.

However, nubia highlights a new 7-layer implementation of transparent materials in its 5th generation UDC hardware. The company calls the the industry's first wave-type electrode trace program that reduces the diffraction of light coming into the selfie camera and improves image clarity.

Camera menus

Judging by the UI in general, there's little to no change in the default camera app for a couple of generations now. So it wasn't hard to find our way around it.

Camera modes

The camera menu is business as usual. Camera modes switch with a simple swipe left and right in a carousel formation. The additional settings menu is placed in the upper-right corner of the viewfinder, and the dedicated Pro mode offers quite a few settings to tinker with.

Camera settings

When shooting macro, you get a small magnifier, which you can move around the viewfinder, but more importantly - it has focus peaking. It allows you to hit the right focusing distance instead of guessing. We found this feature to be particularly useful since there's no autofocus support. We only wish that the macro camera gets a toggle of its own.

Interestingly, the Pro mode works not only with the main camera but also with the ultrawide, but not the macro cam or the selfie.

Daylight photos

Main camera

The overall quality of stills taken with the main camera is pretty good. The images contain plenty of detail, sharpness is great, fine detail is easily spotted and colors are rather punchy.

Daylight main camera samples

However, even in not-so-challenging conditions, dynamic range leaves more to be desired. In high-contrast scenes, the highlights can be clipped while shadows are darker than they should be.

Daylight main camera samples

You can shoot in the full 50MP mode, but there's hardly any benefit from it. Images are softer, with limited dynamic range and noisier.

Daylight 50MP samples

2x zoom

Although there's no dedicated 2x zoom toggle, you can pinch-to-zoom at up to 10x. We capture a couple of images in 2x crop zoom mode to show you the results. They are rather unimpressive - we've seen better implementations. Our main complaint is the inconsistent exposure metering and considerably softer nature of the whole scene compared to the standard 1x mode.

Daylight 2x zoom samples

Ultrawide camera

We are happy to see the 8MP ultrawide camera gone, but the new 50MP unit doesn't seem to differ much. We expected more than just marginal improvements in image quality. The ultrawide samples look grim, underexposed, soft and with limited dynamic range. Sharpness, on the other hand, is much better this time around.

Daylight ultrawide camera samples

Low-light photos

Main camera

The low-light main camera samples are largely unimpressive. They are underexposed, lack fine detail, light sources are often clipped and sharpness is unsatisfactory.

Low-light main camera samples

Alternatively, you can let the Night mode (which you can set to kick in automatically and we recommend doing that) iron out these issues. The dedicated Night mode improves sharpness, boosts dynamic range, brightens up the whole scene and restores quite a bit of lost detail

Night mode main camera samples

On the other hand, the Night mode comes off a little too aggressive. It makes the whole night scene seem like a day. The algorithm goes a bit overboard with the night sky - it lights up like early morning. We were also surprised with how slow the camera app stacks and processes Night mode images, considering the powerful ISP on board.

2x zoom

The Night mode works in the 2x zoom mode as well but it's far from ideal too. Don't expect sharp enough images.

Low-light 2x zoom: Normal • Night mode

Ultrawide camera

Without Night mode, the low-light ultrawide samples look pretty bad. They are soft with limited dynamic range, plenty of noise and are once again underexposed. The Night mode makes them usable, though, balancing out the highlights and shadows, boosting overall brightness and improving sharpness.

Low-light ultrawide camera: Normal • Night mode

Here's how the primary camera on the nubia Red Magic 8 Pro stacks against the rest of the competition in the controlled environment of our Photo Compare Tool.

nubia Red Magic 9 Pro against the iQOO 12 and the Asus ROG Phone 7 in our Photo compare tool

Portraits

Potraits look pretty nice and there's no significant difference between the dedicated Portrait mode and the standard Photo mode in terms of quality and overall rendering. The subject is always well-exposed, sharp, with true-to-life colors and the faux bokeh effect is convincing enough. No complaints here.

Portraits: Portrait mode • Normal

Selfies

It looks as if the new generation UDC provides some measurable benefits to the overall image quality. While still not ideal, the selfies are a considerable step in the right direction coming from the past generations. The selfies are somewhat cleaner with less glow in well-lit environments and the additional sharpness helps a lot. Two things we would like to see fixed in the next generation - better color reproduction and more accurate color temperature - light sources tend to be much warmer than they should.

Selfies

Video recording

Just like its predecessors, the handset supports up to 8K@30fps video recording, while 4K videos can go up to 60fps. You have the option to turn off stabilization if you are shooting with a tripod and you'd need the extra field of view.

Starting with the 8K footage, we still have nothing to complain about. The video footage looks great - wide dynamic range, sharp enough, plenty of fine detail, smooth, no noise, adequate contrast and accurate color reproduction. The footage looks rather raw, though, as if nubia hasn't applied any processing. That's not necessarily a bad thing, as the end result is excellent.

The 4K footage is no different. It just has just a tad less detail, but that's due to the

lower resolution.

The ultrawide video is now 4K as the camera supports it. The footage itself isn't amazing, but it's a huge improvement over the previous generations. It's sharper with a wider dynamic range, no noise, a decent amount of detail and accurate colors. It's just a little underexposed once again.

The nighttime video is surprisingly sharp without much noise and with excellent dynamic range - light sources and highlights look great. Keep in mind that the video isn't stabilized, EIS was off when recording.

You can also take a look at our video compare tool to see how nubia Red Magic 9 Pro stacks against the other phones we've reviewed.

2160p: nubia Red Magic 9 Pro against the iQOO 12 and the Asus ROG Phone 7 in our Video compare tool