Tencent Hunyuan releases Hy Image 3.5 preview, an image model priced at ¥0.15 per 2K image
On Sept 22, 2026 Tencent Hunyuan released Hy Image 3.5 preview, a text-to-image and image-to-image model with up to five reference images, multi-turn editing and output up to 2K. Tencent priced it at ¥0.15 (international: $0.024) per 2K image on Tencent Cloud. In Tencent's internal designer tests it was about 30% better than Hy Image 3.0 and roughly on par with ByteDance's Seedream 5.0 Pro.
Key facts
- Released Sept 22, 2026 (preview); text-to-image and image-to-image, up to 5 reference images, multi-round editing, various aspect ratios, up to 2K
- Tencent Cloud API: ¥0.15 per 2K image (international $0.024); billed per output image
- Tencent's internal evaluation by hundreds of professional designers: ~30% better than Hy Image 3.0, on par with Seedream 5.0 Pro, slightly better than Nano Banana Pro and Qwen-Image-3.0 Pro (company claim)
- Available in Yuanbao, WorkBuddy, ima and other Tencent apps, plus Tencent Cloud MPS and VOD
What happened
Tencent's Hunyuan team shipped a preview of its next image model, aimed at professional design work, at a low per-image API price.
Why it matters
Part of the 2026 price war among Chinese image models (Seedream, Qwen-Image, Hunyuan). All the quality comparisons are Tencent's own internal tests, with no independent arena results yet.
Unverified: whether the weights will be open, as earlier HunyuanImage versions were; no Artificial Analysis or LMArena ranking checked.
Changelog
- 2026-10-01: created (leads run)
Related events
Sources (3)
- officialTencent News: 腾讯混元发布最新生图模型 Hy Image3.5 preview
- pressFutu News: Tencent Hunyuan releases preview of Hunyuan Image 3.5
- pressNetEase: 腾讯混元发布混元图像3.5预览版
id: 2026-09-22-tencent-hy-image-3-5-preview · updated 2026-10-01 · open in the interactive timeline