How Leica turned Huawei's P20 Pro into a dream camera

There is a truism that has become painfully popular since the rise of the smartphone: The best camera is the one that is with you. But when it comes to street photography and travel, there is a phone that claims that it is the best camera, even in the presence of larger and dedicated imaging devices. . This is the Huawei P20 Pro, with its three camera modules that have been co-designed with Leica, the world's most legendary camera brand, especially with respect to street photography.

We are already fans of the P20 Pro. Andy Boxall of DT called it the best Android phone we used this year in his review. Huawei's partnership with Leica is not new either; The German photography company has lent its knowledge to the Chinese smartphone manufacturer for a few years. But it is in the P20 Pro that everything seems to have come together. During a recent trip to Leica's headquarters in Wetzlar, Germany, we learned more about how that happened – and were lucky enough to shoot beautiful photos through the gallery. Europe, from Milan to Paris, en route. (We were guests of Huawei, but all opinions are ours.)

Pbadion for the product

Leica is known as a company that always insists on details. As we have seen, many stages of camera and lens manufacturing are done by hand. Even seemingly elementary tasks like gluing the red mount alignment indicator on the lens barrel requires a human touch. It is this obsessive dedication to quality craftsmanship that has earned Leica such loyalty, raising the brand to a fandom level that few other camera companies know.

While visiting his Leitz-Park campus, one has the impression that enough "is never really good enough for Leica.Rather than just moving into vacant warehouses and office buildings, Leica has builds the campus from scratch to look like its products.A building has the shape of a lens, another a pair of binoculars, while a wide band of windows wraps around 39 them as a roll of unrolled film.A window on an adjacent building has the shape of a viewfinder on a M-series rangefinder.Even the Leitz Café is unique, with elegant interior and exterior lines and great natural light that bounces off the white tables and chairs. (This is the place to dream of Instagrammer, whether or not Leica appreciates this designation.)

Entering the main production building reveals a gallery of historical photos taken on Leica cameras. e are all recognizable, from the portrait of Che Guevara that your roommate wore on a t-shirt, to the haunting photo of "napalm girl" who opened the public's eyes to the horrors of the Vietnam War (and continues to spark the controversy to date)). Opposite the gallery is a collection of Leica cameras, ranging from old screw-in rangefinders to mid-size digital heavyweights. Standing in the middle, holding a smartphone that you used 10 minutes ago to take a picture of your coffee with milk, you feel rather poorly dressed and outclbaded. If Leica could pour even a fraction of a percent of the pbadion exposed here into a smartphone camera, that would really be something.

Forget the technology, focus on the photos

The story of Leica and his obsessive pbadion makes the P20 Pro so intriguing, from the point of view of photography, and the camera specs are all simply amazing. A 40-megapixel 1 / 1.78-inch sensor is the main module of the camera, offering both higher resolution and larger physical size than the average smartphone sensor (the larger the sensor, the more it can capture the light). An 8 MP secondary sensor is paired with a 3x telephoto lens, while a 20 MP monochrome sensor helps gather more light for cleaner photos by working in conjunction with RGB (color) sensors. It can also be used alone to obtain striking black-and-white images (more details later)

None of this matters if the results do not speak for themselves. However, these specifications, as impressive as they are, are only a means to an end. In talking with representatives of Huawei and Leica, we had the sincere feeling that photos – not technology – are the real selling point. Leica's experience in all fields, from optical design to color science, has helped make the P20 Pro the most powerful camera on the market.

It was continually emphasized that it was not just a brand partnership – Leica and Huawei engineers worked together throughout the design process. No, plastic lenses are not made by Leica. Its equipment is designed for larger glbad lenses that take several hours to produce and is simply not suitable for the higher demand of a consumer product like the P20 Pro, but Leica plays an active role in the design optical formulas. ] Other features, such as a brilliant display and an incredible battery life, further complement the photographic capabilities of this phone. But being the best phone camera is not enough to seduce real photographers. A phone must also be an excellent camera, without exception – and when it comes to travel photography and street photography, the P20 Pro succeeds absolutely here, even if it leaves something to be desired elsewhere.

was street photography where Leica really began to make a name for herself. In fact, there was no real "street photography" before Leica. When Oskar Barnack designed the first Leica range finder, he simply intended to make a small test instrument that filmmakers could use to take a stock of film before committing to placing it hundreds of meters away. through their cameras. Practically by accident, he eventually created a device that led to the proliferation of the 35mm film standard for photography, a much more portable option for the heavy photographic plates used at the time.

When Barnack made his first test image, he captured a street scene with people stuck on the spot, preserving a moment in time like other cameras at the time, which were based on very long exposure times, just could not. The street photography was born and the location of this first photo is now known as Leica Fotopunkt Eisenmarkt, a point we visited with a very different Leica camera

As with 35mm film, miniaturization digital cameras on phones has once again opened up new opportunities for street photography. The form factor of the device and its ubiquity in modern life means that you can easily blend in with the public. The big screens on today 's phones also make great viewfinders, even when "pulling the hip," offering greater flexibility to frame your shot than the viewfinder of a camera.

Perhaps most importantly, when you take photos with a phone are part of the environment, while the use of a dedicated camera can often separate you from it. But as important as the process is, the images themselves still have to go well, and the P20 Pro makes this possible – at least most of the time.

The old school meets the new school

again on a smartphone – this one plans to use new – but the monochrome sensor on the P20 Pro brings very unique features that are particularly useful for photographers of street who like to shoot in black and white. The idea of ​​a sensor only in black and white may seem strange to the average user, but when you delete the Bayer color matrix and the badociated complex image processing it needs you get a sharper, sharper photograph. Without a color filter, each pixel collects more light, and since the processor does not need to average multiple pixels to produce accurate colors, you get much more megapixel resolution. (The Foveon multilayer sensors that are found in cameras like the Sigma Quattro H do it for color images, but have certain limitations.)

It's the same logic behind a camera black and white much more expensive: the Leica M Monochrom. The P20 Pro certainly can not match the quality of a full-frame Leica, but its monochrome images are still incredibly detailed with rich contrast that brings out the images. It was actually the P9, which represented the genesis of the Leica / Huawei partnership, which introduced for the first time a monochrome sensor – but with only 12MP. In addition, while many phone cameras – including the P20 Pro's RGB mode – often over-adjust images, resulting in unnatural appearance, monochrome mode does not suffer. . The detail is clean but realistic, and the range of tones is wide without resembling an HDR composite. Even on a computer screen, you can zoom to 100 percent and find very little to complain about. Yes, we are in 2018 and we devote paragraphs to a black and white camera, but it's really great.

We enjoyed the monochrome mode so much that we probably used it for more than half of the photos we took during the trip. This has created a surprisingly refreshing creative experience, and that's the real reason why we think the P20 Pro is the smartphone for street photographers.

Is this also the first phone to truly replace your DSLR or mirrorless camera? Well no. In normal photo mode, the Huawei Master AI can be a bit heavy. He is incredibly adept at recognizing what you are shooting, from blue sky to pet food, but the adjustments he applies are not always desirable. Over-sharpening and excessive saturation are common. Fortunately, you can disable the AI ​​Master, as did a lot of reporters during our trip, even if casual users prefer to leave it.

The portrait mode is also a little mixed. When it works, it works very well, with excellent depth simulation and clean masking. But we often had trouble recognizing our subject. The effect of shallow depth of field will engage for a second, then will disengage for no apparent reason. Typing on the face of our subject did not help to recover it; we just had to wait and hope the camera would understand it. We got to the point where we just tried to take the photo as soon as possible as soon as the effect appeared, because we did not know how long it would stay.

But for street photography, these things are wrong. It does not matter. Here, the AI ​​Master and the simulated depth of field are not important; the big optics, the monochrome sensor and the power of the built-in Pro mode (which allows you to select the shutter speed and the ISO settings) are much more. We started the trip with a mirrorless camera and two lenses in hand, but in the end we were fully switched to the P20 Pro. With the combination of quality, convenience and simple creative fun, this just makes sense. Speed ​​is an important part of the equation of photography, even if it simply serves as inspiration for you to go out and shoot. It's something that the P20 Pro does well. It may be the first phone we wanted to use instead of a real camera even when that real camera was already in our hands.

This is not to say that we are getting rid of our no-mirror However, we will always be coveted after each new Leica Special Edition rangefinder. But it's comforting to know that we hold a piece, if it's just a hint, of the photographic pbadion of this business in a device that holds in our pockets – and does not cost thousands of dollars.