nubia Red Magic 6 review

Three cameras on the back, one on the front

No changes have been made to the camera system ever since the Red Magic 5G from early 2020 so we can only hope for a better ISP on the Snapdragon 888 and the software optimization to improve upon the previous generations.

Anyway, we'll walk you through the camera configuration. The back houses a 64MP, 1/1.72", 0.8µm sensor paired with f/1.8 aperture. For the ultrawide snaps, we have a common 8MP sensor with 1.12µm pixels and is 1/4.0" in size. The aperture is f/2.0. And the macro camera is 2MP with fixed focus.

The front uses the same sensor as the ultrawide camera but has a standard wide lens with f/2.0 aperture.

Camera menus

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 bit of settings to tinker with.

Camera menus

Two things we found interesting. 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 wished more OEMs doing non-AF macro cameras to do this.

And once again, nubia has refused to put a dedicated toggle for the ultrawide camera in its standard Photo mode. You have to switch to Pro mode to use the ultrawide. We wish at least one of the zoom toggles to be replaced with the ultrawide as we doubt anyone would go beyond 3x zoom without a proper telephoto lens anyway.

Daylight samples

Main camera

So the first thing we noticed about the new Red Magic is that it has totally different processing than the previous generation and is somewhat underwhelming. It keeps things more conservative with the colors going for a more natural look. However, the sky seems a bit darker than it actually is suggesting that the software likes to go for darker exposure. You can notice the shadows some of the buildings cast - they seem a bit darker than usual and we shot those samples on a bright sunny day. There were hardly any clouds too.

16MP daylight samples

The HDR seems to be doing a good job as shadows (although darker than expected) have quite a bit of detail in them, whereas the highlights are well-balanced. Sharpness and detail aren't missing but the former seems to be exaggerated with some extra processing. Sharpening halos can be seen at the edge of the buildings, windows and pretty much everywhere you look. Those halos we talk about, however, can only be seen if you zoom in and look close enough so in most cases, it wouldn't bother you.

16MP daylight samples

One re-occurring theme we see with the shadows - things get considerably softer and noise is aplenty even on a sunny day. This means that indoor shots will suffer from the same.

Since the main camera employs a 64MP sensor, there's also the un-binned 64MP mode available. You do get some extra detail out of the 64MP shots but the HDR won't work in this mode and the additional detail comes at the expense of noise. Yet, the overall processing is almost identical to the standard 16MP mode.

64MP daylight samples

Even though there's no proper telephoto camera, the software offers three zoom toggles - 3x, 5x and 10x zoom. It's needless to say that the results are far from ideal but we did try the 3x zoom just out of curiosity. The images are soft, lack detail and the issues we had with the main camera become more apparent.

3x zoom daylight samples

Ultrawide camera

Stills taken with the ultrawide camera are expectedly worse than the main camera but pretty much on par with what the market has to offer. This is usually the case with these snappers in pretty much all price segments. The difference is that some do it well enough that ultrawide photos are not miles behind the main camera's stills. In this particular case, nubia tried to keep the same image processing as you can see on the main camera and it did a decent job at that.

Ultrawide daylight samples

Sadly, there's no way we to overcome the general lack of detail, sharpness, dynamic range and there's plenty of noise on a homogeneous background. The issue with underexposing can be seen here too. The color rendition seems to be in line with the main camera's. Although, if you get close enough to a subject, the results might surprise you as in these situations, the subject appears to be generally sharp-looking.

Low-light samples

Main camera

The Red Magic 6 sure isn't a photography-centered smartphone but we expected a little better from the low-light photos in standard mode. The dynamic range is narrow judging by the clipped highlights, there's some general softness throughout the whole scene and it almost feels as if some of the photos are not in focus. But they indeed are. Noise can be spotted everywhere you look and light sources often look "overblown". We do have to give credit to the phone's ability to expose the shadows and uncover the detail there. Even without Night mode, the stills look generally bright with accurate white balance.

Low-light main camera samples

Switching over to Night mode is always beneficial, no matter the scene. As long as it's dark, that is. If you wait a couple of seconds for the software to take all the needed shots and stack them, you will get considerably sharper scenes with more fine detail (despite the sharpness being a bit artificial-looking), balanced highlights while preserving the detail inside the shadows and improved contrast. In short, waiting for the Night mode is well worth it. Our only complaint would be the strange halo in the sky. Only a small portion of it is black, which is how it's supposed to be, while the rest is dark blue. It could be a problem with the image stacking or the exposure being a bit too much for the sky.

Night mode samples

Ultrawide camera

The ultrawide camera's performance after dusk isn't surprising at all. Shots are muddy, lack wide dynamic range, underexposed at times and are super noisy. There's no Night mode to improve things either so we suggest that you avoid using the ultrawide at night.

Low-light ultrawide camera samples

If you are done with the real-world examples, take a closer look at how the nubia Red Magic 6 fares against the competition.

ZTE nubia Red Magic 6 vs Asus ROG Phone 5 and the nubia Red Magic 5S in our Photo compare tool

Macro samples

The macro camera lacks autofocus, which makes things a bit more challenging when shooting objects from up close but nubia has come up with a neat way to tackle this with its camera software. There's a magnifying lens that zooms in on the subject and focus peaking that helps you choose the right focusing distance.

Macro samples

Now when it comes to the actual photos - they seem on par with the course. Don't expect much detail from a 2MP snapper but sharpness is good and colors might come out a bit bland but they are also pretty close to real-life. We would have appreciated even slightly exaggerated colors for macros even. Lighting conditions have to be optimal too due to the small sensor size and rather narrow f/2.4 aperture.

Portraits

Even with some hairy edge detection, the portrait shots are mostly good-looking. The portrait mode seems to be fine-tuned when it comes to color reproduction too. The subject's skin looks natural and even captures that reddish glow in certain scenes. The background and the objects around him along with the clothes have that color pop. Sharpness and detail are on point too, even in more challenging conditions but we did notice that with brighter background, the software struggles to keep the subject's face properly exposed. The faux bokeh effect also seems to be a bit rough around the edges. In other words - not very convincing in certain complex backgrounds.

Portrait samples

Selfies

Once again, we weren't able to make the portrait selfies work so the standard selfies would have to do. But unfortunately, they do not. The limited 8MP resolution doesn't return detailed photos and in most cases, the selfies were rather blurry. Add the narrow dynamic range, the inability to expose the subject and render its skin properly and you get the samples below.

Selfie samples

Video recording

Naturally, the Red Magic 6 supports up to 8K recording at 30fps but the standard 4K@30 and 60fps are also available. EIS is available in 4K@30fps mode but more on that later. Now let's take a look at the 8K footage.

To be honest, last year's Red Magic 5S did a better job at recording 8K videos. Sharpness and the amount of fine detail have been matched and maybe some noise has been reduced but the newer version of the phone tends to overexpose resulting in clipped highlights and a bit bland colors. The Red Magic 5S showed a better, more colorful rendition from last year although it chose to go with slight underexposure. But we liked it better.

The same goes for the 4K@30fps recording. Naturally, the detail is lower but only if you look close enough. Our issue is once again with the exposure. Just take a look at the bright-colored and white cars along with the white buildings in the distance - they are all clipped. Color reproduction is also pretty conservative. No noise and good contrast up our score, though.

The handset can do HDR videos as well, as long as you have an HDR-capable TV or monitor to watch the footage. It's hard to say whether or not the phone has done a good job with the HDR video on a non-HDR monitor, but the highlights seem a bit better this way. Sadly, that's because the HDR video goes for a lower exposure so the shadows are a bit darker too. This suggests that a rather narrow dynamic range is at hand.

Here are two videos with EIS on and off to see the difference. Trading in a bit of field of view will result in pretty good stabilization even in 2160p@30fps mode.

Get ready for some pixel-peeping and see how the Red Magic 6 compares to some of its rivals in our video compare tool.

2160p: ZTE nubia Red Magic 6 vs Asus ROG Phone 5 and the nubia Red Magic 5S in our Video compare tool