Honor Smart Screen X1 review: In addition to its large screen and great intelligence, it is also the king of quality-price ratio with leapfrog configuration

The advent of Honor Smart Screen not only brought a new concept to the somewhat dull large-screen market, but also opened up a new development direction for Honor's own brand. Under its strong advocacy, television has shifted from being supplemented by intelligence to being the main focus of intelligence. Television is no longer a simple audio-visual entertainment platform, but a smart device that uses powerful chips and engine algorithms to improve the overall viewing quality. Combined with the rich film and television resources provided by the Hongmeng system, Honor Smart Screen is endowed with more attributes and has become the overall control center of home smart devices.

As a pioneer in the smart screen industry, Honor has also set five major standards for smart screens - with no ads at startup as the premise, covering chips, picture quality, sound quality, content and intelligence.

However, no matter how well the product performs in these aspects, the first thing that users pay attention to is always the price. Honor Smart Screen has a clear understanding of user psychology, and its X1 series new products are also priced at the forefront of the industry trend, 3,299 yuan for 65 inches and 2,299 yuan for 55 inches. If combined with subsidies from e-commerce platforms, the price of 55 inches has even dropped to 1,699 yuan (JD.com 618 limited time), crossing the 2,000 yuan psychological price threshold for the public. This shows Honor's strong determination to popularize its products.

So, with such a lethal and affordable price, how does the X1 perform in the five major standards of smart screens? We happen to have a 65-inch Honor X1 on hand, so we will use it as a sample to explain one by one.

The honor standard of being one step ahead of competitors

First of all, the chip. In the past, TVs were only used as audio-visual entertainment platforms, so the demand for chips was not high. After all, the things to be processed were not very complicated. In addition to the main picture quality performance, as long as it could run simple apps, it would be fine.

However, after entering the era of smart screens, the content that chips need to process has increased dramatically. In addition to requiring faster running speeds, they also need to parse higher-definition resources. If the chip performance is too low, users can clearly feel delays and freezes in daily use, affecting the overall experience.

The Honor Smart Screen X1 series is equipped with the Honghu 818 smart chip. It uses a quad-core CPU architecture of 2*A73+2*A53, plus a quad-core Mali G51 GPU, and a built-in video decoder. There is no need to worry about performance, and it can even play 8K videos (AVS2/H.265/VP9 encoding format) at no more than 30fps without pressure.

In addition, the X1 series also supports MEMC motion compensation technology, which uses algorithms to predict the motion trajectory of objects, compensate for some of the picture details that may be missing in the video source, increase the playback frame rate, and greatly improve clarity when watching high-speed sports scenes.

Speaking of chips alone, relying on the performance advantages brought by the Honghu 818, the Honor Smart Screen X1 series is almost one step ahead of its competitors, and even directly eclipses similar models priced at 3,000 yuan.

Excellent chips will inevitably bring extraordinary picture quality. Just like Sony, no matter where the panel comes from, as long as it is adjusted by it, the picture quality can be improved. The Honor Smart Screen X1 65-inch screen comes from BOE, with a resolution of 4K UHD (3840x2160) and a 92% DCI-P3 wide color gamut (approximately equal to 87% NTSC). From the parameter point of view, it is mediocre, but in the test, because of Honor's powerful chip and algorithm power, this panel bursts out with unimaginable strength.

As usual, we first open the color performance and viewing angle test chart for testing.

From the above picture, we can see that X1 has excellent color performance. The HSB color system has clear color blocks, no gradation phenomenon, and the saturation is also very good. The RGBYCM color distribution below also presents a very standard triangle. The color ball transition on the right is also very smooth and soft, without obvious ring band phenomenon.

In terms of tonal restoration, mainly looking at the spherical picture on the right, the grayscale transition is neat and the gradient is smooth. It can be said that in terms of light and dark level details, Honor's performance is infinitely close to some brands with "halos above their heads".

This is a 4K resolution test picture, through which we can see the expressiveness of this screen in displaying details.

As can be seen from the figure, at the 4K recognition capability indicated by the red arrow, the text is displayed clearly and delicately without losing any details. In terms of lines and chessboard blocks, the X1 can also clearly recognize them. It is no exaggeration to say that at a price of 2,000 yuan, Honor's performance is overwhelming. For some mid-range models of high-end brands that are used to cut leeks, the performance of the Smart Screen X1 65-inch is roughly equivalent to their machines priced at 5,000 to 6,000 yuan.

For example, when we open a high-definition picture, the wide color gamut advantage of the Smart Screen X1 is highlighted, with accurate details and no omissions, which is rare on many current models priced at three to four thousand yuan.

In this night scene picture, the X1 shows the color layering very effectively. The lights and buildings in the city are clearly bright and dark, which looks very layered. Even the subtle details in the distance are not missing, which looks very comfortable and pleasing to the eye.

The X1 also excels in 4K HDR video performance.

In the picture, we can see that thanks to the advantage of 92% DCI-P3 wide color gamut, the bright green leaves on the Smart Screen X1 screen stand out against the light background, making the whole composition very layered. The transition from sky blue to sea blue in the background and the blue on the character's clothes is very obvious, and the hue, saturation and brightness are all in place.

The picture quality is in place, and the sound quality cannot be left behind. After all, the combination of picture quality and sound quality is the real "audio-visual" experience. The Honor Smart Screen X1 series is equipped with 4 10-watt speakers, two full-range speakers and two high-frequency speakers, to increase the layering of the sound quality. A total of 1L of sound cavity, coupled with Huawei Histen sound effect technology, can not only make the sound loud and delicate, but also protect the bottom line, making its overall sound texture velvety and high-end.

Although sound quality is a very personal thing and difficult to describe in words, it is worth mentioning that, according to the average person's standard, the built-in speakers of the machine only need to be clear and loud enough. Above this bottom line of "just listening to the sound", the configuration of the X1 has obviously exceeded the expectations of most people.

Honor content ecosystem is more than just aggregation

In terms of content resources, the industry's mainstream video platforms can be found on the X1 series, such as Tencent Aurora TV, Youku Kuai Miao, Mango TV, etc., which can fully meet anyone's needs for film and television, variety shows, sports and animation.

In addition to common film and television content, you can also find popular educational content on X1. The classroom content from preschool to high school is very complete, suitable for children of different ages to learn. Adults can also use sections such as knowledge and documentaries to recharge.

If there is still no content you want in so many categories, you can also add different content sources under the application category. After turning on the option to allow the installation of unfamiliar applications in the settings, you can also install third-party applications (compatible with Android applications) to further expand the range of content choices.

As mentioned at the beginning, the emergence of Honor Smart Screen has changed the simple audio-visual entertainment attribute of TV, and one of these changes is its richer interactive functions, so that after the launch of the Smart Screen, the industry has ridiculed it as more like a giant mobile phone. This is not a derogatory meaning, on the contrary, it is a great compliment to the interaction between large and small screens. Obviously, the Honor Smart Screen X1 series has also inherited this secret recipe and made a series of optimizations to it.

The first is the improvement in the screen projection function. In the previous connection method, you need to have a Magic-Link NFC sticker, turn on the NFC function with your Honor phone and scan the sticker to directly project the screen. Although this method is very novel, it is a bit cumbersome in practice. Small accessories such as stickers are easy to lose, and for some picky users, it is not beautiful enough.

This time, in the Honor Smart Screen X1 series, NFC is directly built into the remote control. As long as you use an Honor/Huawei mobile phone, you don’t need to download any APP. Just pick up the remote control and touch the back of the phone. It is very convenient.

As for the delay, after careful calculation, as long as you use a Honor phone to cast the screen, the delay can be kept within 100ms, which is something that other third-party software cannot do. Unfortunately, phones other than Honor and Huawei cannot use NFC to cast the screen.

Of course, X1 also has a new smart dual-projection function, which can support two mobile phones to project the screen on the TV at the same time, and the two mobile phones can also be split in different horizontal and vertical ways, which increases the future scene development. For example, when playing games, users can open a novel to read on the side, or watch a movie while browsing Taobao and JD.com. In short, the Smart Screen X1 series can do two things at the same time, but will never be indecisive.

In addition, if you install a smart screen app on your phone, you can basically say goodbye to the remote control. This app has been available in the previous generation of smart screens, and there are no major changes this time. Basically, it turns your phone into a remote control with a screen display. You can browse and select content on your phone, and the TV will also synchronize.

Through this function, users can control the large screen in a mirroring way, solving the trouble of traditional TV search, on-demand, parameter setting and other operations that are not easy to operate with a remote control. From now on, you no longer need to use a traditional remote control to input text, and can directly type on the smart screen APP to synchronize to the large screen. Of course, this function can also be used to remotely assist the elderly at home to operate the TV, so that smart life can run through the three generations of old, middle-aged and young people.

Honor is not the first company to use mobile phones to control TVs, but it is the manufacturer with the best foundation in the industry to do it well. The reason is simple. Honor mobile phones have a huge market share and can do it well without promotion. In fact, using mobile phones as remote controls has been a long-cherished wish of the TV industry for many years. It can not only further make up for the shortcomings of remote control buttons and improve the convenience of operation, but also naturally realize screen-to-screen interaction and large and small screen interaction, paving the way for the real realization of smart home environment.

In addition to these, Honor has also buried a function similar to an Easter egg in the interaction between large and small screens. If you don't want to move your fingers, the X1 also has a built-in YOYO voice assistant, which is equipped with 6 microphones for far-field voice. Even in a large living room, you can wake it up without a remote control. As a remote control, the mobile phone can not only control the TV content, but also play the sound as a speaker. After plugging in headphones, you can enjoy private time at a distance, which replaces the Bluetooth headset connection function that was previously very useless on TV.

Seeing this, the result for the Honor Smart Screen X1 series is self-evident, and the fact is indeed so. In the JD.com 618 TV sales list that just ended this year, the newly released X1 was able to dominate the list for a long time, breaking the sales record that had been dormant for five years. Its strong soft and hard power is visible to tens of millions of users.

But for other friendly competitors, the arrival of the Smart Screen X1 series is really a huge challenge.

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.