Nubia Z80 Ultra Review: The All-Rounder Street Photography & Gaming Flagship

Talking about Nubia, everyone's impression is of its iconic red-ring humanistic lens and full-screen design. Recently, the Nubia Z80 Ultra went on sale; the DECO makes subtle refinements to the previous generation's design language while maintaining its high recognizability. On the hardware side, the Nubia Z80 Ultra is equipped with the fifth-generation Snapdragon 8 Elite and three high-quality lenses, with upgrades to both imaging and performance. As for what improvements these changes bring to the user experience? Let's take a look.

The AI-Powered Street Photography King

On the imaging front, while other brands are competing on telephoto, Nubia has chosen to upgrade the ultrawide — though a phone's imaging capability is often not determined by a single camera. Let's first take a look at the Nubia Z80 Ultra's camera hardware specs. The Nubia Z80 Ultra's main camera uses a 35mm humanistic narrative main shooter, with a sensor size of 1/1.3 inches and an aperture of f/1.7. The ultrawide uses an 18mm high-dynamic-range ultrawide main shooter, with a sensor size of 1/1.55 inches and an aperture of f/1.8. The telephoto uses an 85mm periscope telephoto, with a sensor size of 1/2 inch and an aperture of f/2.48. Now let's talk about the software: the Nubia Z80 Ultra uses Neovision Taishan AI Imaging 5.0 technology to provide AI assistance for photography. Overall, both hardware and software are excellent — but the specific performance is best shown through sample shots.

Photos shot with the Nubia Z80 Ultra's main camera have rich, saturated colors and excellent resolving power. The transitions in the cloud layers are very natural — neither muddy nor oversharpened — very well balanced.

If you lack inspiration during street photography, you can try the camera's built-in AI Inspiration Assistant, which can provide you with some shooting suggestions to help you capture excellent street photos.

If you are not entirely satisfied with the colors produced by the native camera, the Nubia Z80 Ultra's camera also has a built-in Filter Factory. The Filter Factory offers nine filters to choose from; after hands-on testing, each filter has its own distinct character. Photos taken with the Bresson filter are richer in light and shadow texture, making tonal values the core element of the image.

(▲ Bresson filter sample)

Photos taken with the Negative filter have clean, vivid colors; shadows have more layering, and the overall texture is very close to film — very suitable for friends who enjoy street photography.

(▲ Negative filter sample)

The ultrawide is the most significantly upgraded lens on the Nubia Z80 Ultra. Compared to the previous generation, this lens has higher dynamic range tolerance; even in high-contrast environments it can recover more shadow detail. The highlights and shadows in the sample shots are clearly differentiated, with a natural appearance; the shadows still retain some detail and don't simply go pure black.

Its periscope telephoto also delivers excellent resolving power — the image is clear and sharp; without needing AI enhancement, it can capture telephoto images full of fine detail.

Finally, let's look at the Nubia Z80 Ultra's night photography performance. When shooting night scenes, issues such as difficulty focusing, mixed neon lighting, and reduced color accuracy often arise. To address these problems, the Nubia Z80 Ultra introduces laser autofocus and Flicker multi-spectral color temperature sensor technology. Based on the sample shots, its colors are very accurate, with no blooming phenomenon. Autofocus is also very precise — point and shoot — making the night photography experience very nice.

To satisfy some professional users, Nubia has also launched a Photography Kit for the Z80 Ultra; once attached, the phone takes on the appearance of a retro camera. Users can use the dials on the kit to adjust exposure compensation and filters, helping users capture the decisive moment.

Ultra-Level Gaming Performance

Imaging flagships often fall short of gaming flagships in performance, but on the Nubia Z80 Ultra you can also enjoy gaming flagship-level specs. The Nubia Z80 Ultra is equipped with the fifth-generation Snapdragon 8 Elite chip + full-speed LPDDR5X + UFS 4.1 — currently the highest performance hardware spec on the market, dubbed the "Ultimate Iron Triangle," capable of delivering a better gaming experience to users. Not only that, Nubia also equips the same gaming engine as Red Magic, which can comprehensively optimize frame rate, thermal management, and power consumption. To better demonstrate its performance, we tested this phone's performance using two games: Genshin Impact and Honor of Kings. The test environment was uniformly set at an ambient temperature of 25°C and screen brightness of 200 nits.

(▲ Honor of Kings frame rate curve)

In Honor of Kings, the graphics settings were set to Extreme Frame Rate + Ultimate Quality, with a 30-minute ranked match test. The average frame rate was 119.9 fps, and the average power consumption was 3.2W.

(▲ Genshin Impact frame rate curve)

In Genshin Impact, the graphics settings were set to Highest, with a 30-minute Sumeru City test. The average frame rate was 59.5 fps, and the average power consumption was 3.98W.

From the above high-load gaming scenario tests, the Nubia Z80 Ultra's frame rate performance is stable and power consumption control is also quite excellent. With the fifth-generation Snapdragon 8 Elite chip paired with the Red Magic-tuned gaming engine optimization, the Nubia Z80 Ultra achieves Ultra-level gaming performance. Battery life is nothing to worry about either — the Nubia Z80 Ultra has a 7200mAh fourth-generation Nanhai battery, capable of gaming comfortably for a full day. Worth noting, the Nubia Z80 Ultra will also receive exclusive optimizations for four games: Honor of Kings, Delta Force, League of Legends Mobile, and Darkness Zone. Among these, Darkness Zone will support 90fps full-map ray tracing and 2K+120fps game display settings — the most impressive optimization performance.

The Industry's Only Sky Full-Screen Imaging Flagship

Beyond image quality and frame rates, immersion is also part of the gaming experience. To give gamers better immersion, the Nubia Z80 Ultra adopts a Sky Full-Screen design. Not only that, the Nubia Z80 Ultra has also narrowed the bezels, making the display performance even more outstanding.

Worth mentioning, the Nubia Z70 Ultra DECO had straight-edge frames, which were not comfortable to hold. The Nubia Z80 Ultra has changed these frames to rounded corners, improving the holding experience.

All-New Intelligent AI, Convenient Life

The Nubia Z80 Ultra also brings an all-new AI: Nebula AIOS 2. Its main upgrades are divided into two major areas: Super Search and Smart Call.

Xiaoxing's Super Search can search local documents — even if you describe the content of a file, it can help you find the file you need. Not only that, it can also help you find the notes you need in the notepad, which is very convenient. And Xiaoxing's Smart Call is even more intelligent. When you are busy with work and cannot conveniently answer the phone, you can tap the AI Call function and choose AI Answer or Text Call. After selecting AI Call, Xiaoxing can respond based on the other party's speech, and after the call ends it will generate a call record saved to the notepad, making it convenient for users to review the call content. After selecting Text Call, the user inputs what they want to say, and Xiaoxing will play the voice to the other party using the built-in voice system; after the other party responds, it will convert their speech to text and present it to the user in the chat window.

Summary

I think the Nubia Z80 Ultra is a phone with a human touch. At a time when a host of phones are obsessively piling resources into telephoto, it chose to upgrade the ultrawide instead — as if telling us: don't blindly chase poetry and distant horizons, but also cherish the people right in front of you. The upgrade to the AI assistant Xiaoxing allows people to communicate with each other more effectively. The performance upgrade means fewer stutters, letting people have a slightly less frustrating entertainment experience after a hard day's work. If you also want to experience Nubia's human touch, this will be a phone you can confidently choose.