Motorola Edge 50 Fusion review

Nice dual-camera setup

The Motorola Edge 50 Fusion only has a pair of rear cameras at its disposal. Its bigger siblings - the Pro and Ultra get a telephoto as well. Still, the 50MP main camera is quite modern and OIS-equipped, and the 13MP ultrawide is not your basic, "run-of-the-mill" ultrawide either. It has autofocus, so it can double as a macro shooter.

The primary camera on the Edge 50 Fusion uses a Sony LYTIA LYT-700C 50MP sensor, which offers all-pixel autofocus and the lens has OIS. Motorola claims that this is the most advanced sensor in the segment.

The ultrawide camera seems to have been borrowed straight from last year's Edge 40 model. It is based on a 13MP SK Hynix HI1336 sensor with 1.12µm individual pixels and a 1/3" optical format. The f/2.2 aperture lens does feature autofocus, so it can double as a close-up camera.

• Wide (main): 50 MP Sony LYTIA LYT-700C f/1.9, 1/1.56", 1.0µm, PDAF, OIS; 2160p@30fps
• Ultra wide angle: 13 MP SK Hynix HI1336, f/2.2, 1/3", 1.12µm, AF; 2160p@30fps
• Front camera: 32 MP Samsung ISOCELL S5KJD1, f/2.5, 1/3.14", 0.7µm; 1080p@30fps

The Edge 50 Fusion uses a Samsung ISOCELL S5KJD1 32MP sensor on the front. It is commonly known as the ISOCELL JD1 and features 0.7µm pixels and a 1/3.14" optical format. Its f/2.5 lens is fixed focus only.

The camera app on the Edge 50 Fusion is developed in-house, in contrast to the otherwise stock-looking approach to software.

The basics are as usual - the camera modes are arranged in a customizable carousel formation, with the 'More' tab at the rightmost end of the carousel holding the more seldom-used shooting modes.

Pro mode gives you full control over the camera's settings like white balance, ISO, focus, shutter speed, and exposure compensation, and it works on all cameras - both rear ones and the selfie camera (minus the manual focusing). A tiny live histogram is provided, but there's no focus peaking or zebras.

You get some settings in each camera mode right on the main UI, with the others hidden away in the settings menu. However, there isn't a straightforward separation of what you're going to find where. For example, the full-res mode for selfies is found in the settings menu, while full-res capture for the rear cameras is accessed from the 'Ultra-Res' mode on the carousel. A lot of the app's peculiarities are long-standing Moto things, so you may be right at home if you're a recurring user, but that doesn't necessarily make them intuitive.

Before moving on, we would like to point out that we found the camera app extremely laggy and unresponsive in our Edge 50 Fusion review unit. Hopefully, it will get fixed with an update, but its current state is really poor. So much so that it seems to introduce some stuttering in the captured videos.

Daylight photo quality

Main camera

The main camera on the Edge 50 Fusion captures photos at right around 12.5MP by default. These shots are solid through and through. There is plenty of detail in the frame, and everything looks nice and sharp. There is practically no noise. Contrast is good, too. Color saturation is quite high. Many will enjoy the extra "pop".

Motorola Edge 50 Fusion: 12.5MP main camera samples

The Edge 50 Fusion has a "style" selector in the main camera UI. There is the default "Natural style," and then there is the "Auto Enhance style", which is equivalent to what the Enhance button does in the Google Photos app. The latter takes color saturation to the extreme for even more 'pop'. Here are some samples.

Motorola Edge 50 Fusion: 12.5MP main camera Auto Enhance style samples

The Edge 50 Fusion captures pretty good portraits with its main camera. Faces look nice and natural with pleasing skin tones and plenty of texture. Subject detection and separation are great, and so is the quality of the background blur. The portrait camera UI does offer toggles for zoomed portrait shots, which also look great.

Motorola Edge 50 Fusion: 12.5MP main camera portrait samples

You can force the main camera to shoot in its full 50MP resolution (a bit over 50MP even). However, these shots don't have any benefit in terms of detail. They are distinctly less processed and, hence, softer than the regular shots if that is your thing. You will have to deal with huge file sizes, though.

Motorola Edge 50 Fusion: 12.5MP • 50MP • 12.5MP • 50MP

The Edge 50 Fusion lacks a dedicated telephoto camera but still has plenty of resolution on the main cam to pull off good 2x digital zooms.

Motorola Edge 50 Fusion: 12.5MP main camera 2x zoom samples

Ultrawide camera

The 13MP ultrawide camera on the Edge 50 Fusion is quite decent. Its photos are nice and detailed, given the resolution at hand, and are plenty sharp. However, much of that sharpening can look artificial.

Colors look good and, just like the main camera, have a bit more saturation and "pop" to them, though they are not exactly matched with the main camera.

Motorola Edge 50 Fusion: 13MP ultrawide camera samples

The ultrawide camera has a neat party trick thanks to its autofocusing capabilities. It can do closeups. These turn out reasonably well.

Motorola Edge 50 Fusion: 13MP ultrawide camera macro samples

Selfie camera

Selfies from the 32MP cam come out in 8MP by default. These look pretty good, though not perfect. Some skin texture is coming through, and skin tones are decent, though a bit too saturated.

Motorola Edge 50 Fusion: 8MP selfie camera samples

Low-light camera quality

The main camera captures very competent low-light photos. There is plenty of detail. Colors look nice, and light sources are handled competently. Noise is also kept to a minimum.

Motorola Edge 50 Fusion: 12.5MP main camera low-light samples

The ultrawide camera expectedly struggles a bit more in low light than the main one. Still, the photos it captures are quite decent overall. There is plenty of detail, though noise is a lot as well. Light sources tend to be blown out more often than not, but surprisingly, some detail in the shadows is not completely crushed.

Motorola Edge 50 Fusion: 13MP ultrawide camera low-light samples

Video capture quality

The Moto Edge 50 Fusion can shoot 4K@30fps videos across all of its cameras, which you do not see every day in its price segment. By default, videos get saved in an AVC/h.264 video stream of around 63 Mbps with a stereo 48 kHz AAC audio track, inside an MP4 container. You can choose to capture in HEVC/h.265 instead and save some space at the price of more limited playback compatibility.

The main camera captures pretty great 4K videos. These have plenty of detail, no noise and a decently wide dynamic range. Colors are, once again, quite saturated. There is no trace if the oversharpening or the strong contrast we saw on the Edge 50 Pro and Ultra.

At 2x zoom, the videos look comparable, though a bit more aggressively sharpened.

The ultrawide captures surprisingly clean and detailed videos. These are a bit softer than the main camera, but the colors aren't nearly as saturated on the plus side and look much better.

Interestingly, if you turn OFF the electronic stabilization on this camera, along with the wider field of view, you also get choppy footage at 22 frames per second.

Selfie videos are solid through and through. Well, unfortunately, not in the literal sense since they are quite shaky with stabilization disabled. Other than that, the quality is great, and there is an abundance of detail. Skin tones look good, and some skin texture is coming through.

Speaking of stabilization, you can enable it at the full 4K resolution on every one of the cameras, which is great. It does eat away quite a bit of the frame, but that is understandable. The EIS generally works great to smooth out bumps and shakes but, unfortunately, introduces quite a bit of focus hunting on the main and ultrawide cameras. Since it is fixed-focus, the selfie is not affected and benefits from nearly perfect stabilization.

At night, the main camera does pretty well, especially in terms of detail. On the flip side, there is quite a bit of noise in the frame, light sources are mostly blown out, and darker areas lack detail for the most part.

Video sample playlist

You can check out the playlist below, which includes multiple video samples.