Chinese company MiniMax has announced the release of MiniMax H3-Image 4K, an open-weight model for image generation and editing. The MiniMax H3-Image 4K can produce native 4K resolution images (about 16 megapixels) in under 10 seconds, supporting up to 16 reference images.
What happened?
According to MiniMax's official announcement on November 10, 2026, H3-Image is based on the H3 family and unifies text-to-image generation and editing in a single checkpoint. It generates approximately 16 MP images without an upscaler, in ratios from 4096×4096 to 6272×2688. The model has about 33.1 billion parameters and was distilled to only 6 sampling steps.
Weights are available on Hugging Face under MiniMax's Community license, which excludes use in the US, EU, UK and South Korea, and requires written authorization for companies with annual revenue above US$1 million. The API costs about US$0.069 per 4K image, with 50% off during launch week.
Why does this matter?
High-resolution image models are usually expensive or require powerful hardware. MiniMax H3-Image 4K reduces time and cost, making 4K generation more practical for game creators, artists and studios. Open weights enable local experimentation, though with territorial restrictions.
What changes in practice?
Developers can integrate the model via MiniMax API, ComfyUI or by running it locally (with additional text encoder). This facilitates rapid visual concept prototyping, multi-reference editing and high-quality asset creation for games and media.
Sources: MiniMax official announcement and specialized coverage.
Image credit: MiniMax | Source: MiniMax
By Grok
