realme C67 Review Philippines: Street Photography on a Budget

Review Verdict: The realme C67 is a significant upgrade over last year’s C55, offering better value for money at the same price point with key upgrades on the main camera, processor, and battery life.

Pros:

-The main camera is a big improvement

-Stereo speakers have good audio

-Great battery life

Cons:

-No ultra-wide camera

-Thick bottom bezel

-Snapdragon 685 is not meant for gaming

After making waves with the very affordable Note 50, realme’s next release in the Philippines is on the upper budget segment with the C67. Armed with the same price point of last year’s C55, the C67 aims to offer better value with improvements on the main camera, processor, and display. Are these improvements enough to justify the C67’s asking price?

realme C67 Review Philippines: Design

Unlike the realme C5x series last year, the C67 went for an oblong-shaped camera module with gold camera ring accents highlighting its dual rear camera setup. The camera bump adds a few mm of thickness to the C67’s slim body, which is at 7.59mm. Despite being that skinny, the C67 still comes with a 5000mAh battery inside.

Our review unit is in Sunny Oasis, and we like the matte texture that has a brushed-like finish that shimmers when light hits it. The C67’s button and port layout is similar to the C5x series last year but adds another speaker on top and an IP54 rating to protect it against accidental water splashes.

realme C67 Review Philippines: Display and speakers

While the C67 technically has the same 6.72-inch 90hz IPS display used on last year’s C55, we noticed that the C67 has a brighter display, making it more usable outdoors. The colors on the C67’s display are similar to what we saw on the C55, which is generally good given its asking price.

While we wished that the C67 had thinner bezels, realme did add stereo speakers that sound significantly better compared to the single, bottom-firing speaker we’ve seen on past C-series models. What makes the C67’s stereo speakers great is that you get a balanced soundstage with audible highs and lows.

realme C67 Review Philippines: Cameras

The realme C67 borrows the realme 11‘s dual rear camera setup, which consists of a 108-megapixel ISOCELL HM6 main shooter and a 2-megapixel depth sensor.

The depth sensor is forgettable since it’s just a filler camera, so the focus is on the main camera–which has the best sensor we’ve seen on realme’s C-series.

With the ISOCELL HM6, the realme C67 supports 3x in-sensor zoom, which makes good use of the sensor’s resolution power to give you a telephoto-like focal length. Similar to what we experienced on the realme 11, the C67’s in-sensor zoom is useful, and we got good photos with it at 3x digital zoom.

Aside from the in-sensor zoom feature, the C67 also inherits realme’s Street Mode feature that gives you a variety of filters to choose from for more creative shooting options. Unlike the realme 11, the C67 does have a 120mm (5x digital zoom) option, but the 72mm (3x digital zoom) is much better if you’re after image quality.

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The C67’s video capabilities are limited, with recording capped at Full HD 30FPS. You do get a Super Steady mode that makes good use of EIS to keep your footage stable even while shooting handheld. Digital zoom options are 2x and 5x by default, and the quality is not as good as compared to photo mode. Those limitations aside, we got good-quality video footage from the C67.

realme C67 Review Philippines: Internals and Battery Life

While it’s similar to the C55 by offering 8GB/128GB and 8GB/256GB variants, the C67 gets an side-grade with a Snapdragon 685 processor.

Synthetic benchmarks show that the Snapdragon 685 is better than the C55’s Helio G88 in CPU tests, which explains why the C67 runs smoother especially when multitasking between different apps.

While the Snapdragon 685 does lag behind the Helio G88 when it comes to GPU tests, we found the C67 to be serviceable for games–as long as you manage expectations when it comes to graphics settings.

We manage to play Genshin Impact at medium graphics with minimal frame drops and stutters, and overall gameplay is better with graphics set to low. It’s the same scenario for Honkai: Star Rail, where the C67 performs smoothly as long as graphics are set to low.

Like other C-series phones, the C67 gets realme’s Mini Capsule interface, and the current version is more useful: aside from showing charging notifications, the Mini Capsule also tracks steps and shows essential weather info. You also get Android 14-based realmeUI out of the box, and realme told us that the C67 will get two major updates and 3 years of security updates.

The C67’s software upgrade commitment is decent for a budget device. However, we wish realme to match Samsung’s ambitious promise of 4 major updates and 5 years of security updates on all of its Galaxy A-series phones.

Like the C55, the C67 has a 5000mAh battery that supports 33w charging. realme’s decision to use the Snapdragon 685 and optimize it for realmeUI paid off: we got an impressive battery life of 19 hours and 50 minutes in PCMark’s battery benchmark test, which makes the C67 last for around a day and a half–or as much as 2 days with moderate use.

realme C67 Review Philippines: Wrap-up and Conclusions

The C67 offers better value than last year’s C55 by getting features like an IP54 rating, stereo speakers, and a brighter display. The biggest upgrade of the C67 is with its camera, as the 108-megapixel main camera inherits some of the features that are found on the more expensive realme 11 like 3x in-sensor zoom and Street Mode. Those camera features make the C67 a good budget option for everyday street photography.