Honor advertises a peak brightness of up to 1600 nits for the MagicBook Art 14 2025, but we only measure 740 nits

The slim MagicBook Art 14 got an update for 2025 and is now equipped with Intel Arrow Lake processors as well as an improved keyboard. The high-resolution OLED touchscreen with 120 Hz was already excellent last year, and Honor claims that the peak brightness increased significantly up to 1600 nits, even though the other specs are identical. So far, these brightness levels in laptops are usually reserved for Mini-LED screens or Tandem OLED panels.

The scenario for the peak brightness is specified by the manufacturer in the tech specs, but the settings are a bit imprecise. You have to activate HDR mode and use corresponding HDR contents or the brightness sensor has to be active. We basically know this behavior from smartphones, so they can reach higher brightness values in the sun, for example. For laptops, however, this is not the standard. We obviously tried to reach the advertised peak brightness, but we did not succeed. We tried multiple combinations, since there is the automatic brightness setting from Windows as well as a dynamic backlight option in Honor's own PC Manager software. We also had the laptop in the summer sun and tried other external light sources as well to simulate a bright environment. However, all of our attempts failed and the maximum peak brightness was around 740 nits.

This is obviously still not a bad result, but more and more panels (like Lenovo's current OLED panels) often manage peak brightness values of 1,000-1,100 nits. That our review unit did not reach the advertised peak brightness is obviously not great, but it still does not change the fact that the image quality is still excellent with 120 Hz and accurate color profiles, even though we managed to improve the accuracy further with our own calibration (the corresponding profile is available as a free download in our review). There is no screen-door effect on bright surfaces and the DC dimming at 120 Hz with a very low amplitude should not cause any issues. Please see our full review of the new Honor MagicBook Art 14 2025 for more information.