Huawei P30 Pro: Camera Review – Pure Shine

The Huawei P30 Pro is there and it has a lot to live on.

Huawei has changed the perception of the world that phones can (shock, horror) take fantastic pictures with the P20 Pro.

Shortly after, the entire telephony market changed course and conceded that the camera was the next big spec race. Now, Huawei has to prove that he can challenge once again in what has become a very crowded space.

When Huawei first partnered with Leica to provide its phone lenses, eyebrows rose – you do not have to associate with Leica as without wanting to create a quality camera phone.

This is a strategy that has paid off, as we have seen with the Huawei P20 Pro and the Huawei Mate 20 Pro, the Chinese phone giant has managed to match the optics to sensors and software market leaders. But the iPhone XS, Google Pixel 3 and the Samsung Galaxy S10 have all entered this market with a brilliant camera offering.

One year is long when you have rivals as good, so what does the Huawei P30 Pro actually provide to photographers?

Huawei P30 Pro camera: design and features

The Huawei P30 Pro is an intriguing beast in terms of specifications. It's a device that manages to mix mind-blowing spirit & # 39; with & # 39; meh & # 39 ;.

The hallucinating mind at first: the phone contains four cameras at the back of its chassis. A 40MP lens (wide angle lens, f / 1.6, OIS), 20MP (ultra-wide angle lens, f / 2.2), 8MP (Telephoto, f / 3.4, OIS) and a time-of-flight camera for a better perception of the depth.

At the top of these specifications are its zoom capabilities. Huawei has managed to use a 5x optical zoom, which manages this 10x zoom with a hybrid quality of artificial intelligence. It can also go up to 50 times, but it depends on the digital rather than the optics.

It's an awesome camera, but eagle-eyed readers will notice that it's the same thing as the P20 Pro when it comes to megapixels. But the maximum aperture on the main 40MP camera has been improved from f / 1.8 to f / 1.6.

The new RYYB sensor on the main unit is perhaps the most important camera upgrade on the P20 Pro, but the least obvious. The use of red-yellow-yellow-blue photocells on the surface of the sensor rather than the traditional red-green-green-blue "Bayer" matrix is ​​said to offer a light sensitivity exceeding 40% of that of the P20 Pro, the yellow penetrating there more clearly than green. But this simple change required the implementation of all Huawei's technical skills.

What the P30 Pro does not have is a monochrome sensor. This has been replaced in favor of the ultra-wide camera f / 2.2 20MP, equivalent 16 mm. Yet many will cry the loss of the monochrome sensor. In our tests, the B & W photos we took were correct.

On the front of the Huawei P30 Pro are a dewdrop (housing an awesome 32 MPa selfie camera) and a 2240×1080 OLED display. It is now 6.47 inches, compared to 6.1 inches of the P20 Pro, but we can not help being disappointed by this number of pixels.

That's where the "meh" comes in: the Samsung Galaxy S10 (and the 10+) displays 3040×1440 pixels (550dpi), the iPhone XS displays 2688×1242 (458dpi).

At 398 dpi, the P30 Pro's screen looks disappointing on paper, especially when compared to its stable, the Mate 20 Pro, which features a 6.39-inch and 538-dpi display.

However, with fewer pixels, the battery life is potentially increased – Huawei says the 4200mAh P30 Pro can last for two days of moderate use and a whole day of heavy use. In our tests, it lasted all day and more.

Plus, even at "just" 398 dpi, it's not like you're noticing a pixel at the naked eye anytime soon.

The handset we reviewed had 8GB of RAM, used the Kirin 980 chip (as seen in the Mate 20 Pro) and had 256GB of storage – more than enough to keep your images on the device, if you prefer not to use cloud. storage, such as Google Photos.

In terms of size and weight, the P30 Pro is a little thinner than the Mate 20 Pro (at 8.41 mm, compared to 8.6 mm), but slightly heavier (192 grams, compared with 189 grams). It is thicker and heavier than the P20 Pro (the P20 Pro measures 7.8 mm deep and weighs 180 grams). Given the larger screen, everything is forgiven.

Like the P20 Pro, the lenses protrude from the back of the camera. It's a remarkable lip that you can feel in your pocket.

Our biggest concern was to damage or scratch them, so we would definitely invest in a deal. If you are one of the lucky ones, a silicon case is included in the box, just like a quick charger (40 W to charge the phone in just a few minutes, you can also charge it wirelessly) and USB-C headphones .

Huawei P30 Pro camera: performance

In terms of performance, the P30 Pro is among the best. This bump of RAM is certainly welcome. It meant we were going through the menu screens like a knife in melted butter.

From the home screen to the camera app it's a snap and it's nice to see the camera app's camera options simplified in EMUI 9.1 (Huawei's software superimposed to Android 9).

When we say streamlined, we do not want to say that Huawei removed features, but presented them better. AI is now easier to turn on and off and is not buried in settings.

HDR is now an optional feature of the application's More section (which will appeal to those who are not fans), while Macro mode has its own dedicated section.

We took hundreds of pictures with the P30 Pro and it's a brilliant camera phone – the best we've tried. As with the P20 Pro, the manual options available are many, the automatic mode is fantastic.

Having a quad-camera setup means you have a myriad of lenses to choose from for taking pictures.

As you can see in the photos below, when you switch from normal shooting (10MP, unless you manually push up to 40MP) towards the 16mm wide-angle lens, you can see that many more images are captured. In our images of Little Venice in London, a whole new path appeared.

We also appreciated the fact that Huawei seems to have toned down its sharpening. Most of the images we took were taken in overcast weather, but there was still a lot of clarity without it being felt that Huawei had gone crazy with the HDR mode.

There is the option of doing it yourself, but we have not noticed a huge difference with the mode enabled. This pigeon image was taken with the HDR mode enabled. Yes, there are details but it's more subtle than the Mate 20 Pro.

One of the standout features here is definitely the 5x optical zoom. As you can see in our photo of the standing model, the transition from normal to 5x offers a little decent clarity. It's definitely the best zoom we've tried on a phone.

Push it to 10x, however, the sharpness tarnishes a bit and at 20x, artifacts appear. With a steady hand you can zoom in to 50x – it's fun to get close to something as far, but the quality is not that great.

We tried again in our shot of the London Eye and the 50x zoom manages to locate people in one of the capsules. Yes, they are fuzzy, but it is very difficult to drop something that looks like a normal image from so far away. Grainy but still impressive.

We have found that the 1x zoom jump at 5x is pretty shocking – the Huawei P30 Pro is missing the 3x zoom that we can find on the Mate 20 Pro, we would have liked to see it included as well as the 5x zoom.

Another remarkable feature is the nighttime shooting of the P30 Pro. We never thought it would happen, but Huawei has managed to exceed the power of the Google Pixel 3 in terms of night shooting.

The images that he can get in the dark are fantastic. Even better (though a bit confusing), the P30 Pro can effortlessly handle nightly shots in its normal shooting mode.

As you can see from our pictures, there is very little between night mode and normal mode. This is remarkable, because in night mode, there was a five-second exposure, while in normal mode, the ISO is doubled and no exposure is pending.

In comparison, the Pixel 3 does a decent job with shooting, but there is excessive saturation that does not exist in the P30 Pro shots.

Pro mode of the P30 Pro is once again a playground for photographers, but it was a little frustrated.

The rendering of shots does not seem to be as good as the available automatic mode and the ISO sensitivity is greatly reduced in Pro mode. Where you can go up to 409,600 ISO (crazy) in normal mode, this value is kept at 6,400 in Pro mode.

A lot more DIY, though, and we had fun with the mode. The ability to change the shutter speed and white balance means that if you fine-tune, you can get quite special results.

Perhaps the best manual control we found on the P30 Pro was in Aperture mode though. The ToF sensor is the handset's fourth magic camera, which adds a sophisticated sense of depth to the phone.

You can see it in Aperture mode, where you can manually drag the f stops (f2.2 to f0.95). The results are superb, as you can see in this photo of the model's face.

Portrait mode is a more automatic version of the Aperture mode – both modes treat the hair much better than the Mate 20 Pro and we can only blame the ToF sensor. The bokeh effect also works well with the front camera (minus the ToF).

Huawei P30 Pro camera: final verdict

The Huawei P30 Pro is a great phone with camera. We would even go so far as to say that it's the best camera phone you can buy at the moment.

But there are caveats: it's a phone using the same processor as the Mate 20 Pro, featuring camera lenses with identical megapixels and d & # 39; 39, a screen of inferior quality. But, it offers the best zoom in its class, the best photography in low light and some of the best bokehs we've seen, thanks to the additional ToF lens.

This is Huawei in an intermediate stage. We do not doubt, with what we have seen here, that if the next Huawei phone that will come out, with a new chipset, a better screen and some new camera laps, it will be a 5-star phone.

As a pure camera, nothing better than the P30 Pro currently.