The new Huawei phone has a 5x optical zoom, thanks to a periscope lens

Huawei has officially announced the Huawei P30 Pro smartphone today. Although it features a new SoC manufactured by Huawei, a built-in optical fingerprint reader and many other high-end features, the strong point is without a doubt the optical zoom of the camera, which is up to five times higher. No digital zoom. Real, optical zoom.

On most current high-end smartphones, such as the iPhone XS and the Galaxy S10, you'll never get that 2X optical zoom. These are usually found in a second sensor and a lens at the back of the phone, allowing you to choose between a standard 1x lens or an extra 2x lens. The reason you do not usually get large zoom magnifiers in smartphones is that zooms take up space. Inside a zoom lens are a series of smaller lenses, some of which move to the inside of the body of the lens to change the focal length. A greater distance between the lenses will give you a higher zoom multiplier, and on real cameras it can be several meters long.

The space, of course, is a priority in smartphones. Imagine a smartphone sitting face down and you would have to install a vertical stack of screen, CMOS sensor and lens in a height of about 8mm. There is simply not much room.

But if we did not do it to have stack all the components vertically? The tip of Huawei's 5x optical zoom is that it uses a periscope design. From the outside, this looks like a normal camera setup, albeit with an awesome square camera opening. Inside, the components turn right after the lens cover and the zoom lens components and the CMOS sensor are arranged horizontally. Now, instead of having to clutter a bunch of lenses and the CMOS chip in an 8mm vertical phone space, we have several acres of horizontal phone space. We have already seen prototypes of Periscope cameras from Oppo, but for commercial cameras, the Huawei P30 Pro is the first.

While optical zoom is the big new feature of the camera, there are four cameras in total at the back of the P30 Pro. A 40MP main camera, a 20MP wide angle, 5MP 8MP telephoto and a Time of Flight depth detection camera. The 40 MP main camera uses a 1 / 1.7-inch type sensor that, measured diagonally, makes it 32% larger than the Galaxy S10 or iPhone XS type 1 / 2.55-inch sensors . I believe the most important sensor ever recorded in a smartphone is still the Nokia 808 Pureview, which was type 1 / 1.2 inch.

Huawei also made great use of the new pixel layout "RYYB" in its camera sensor. Normally, CMOS sensors are "RGGB", one red pixel, two green and one blue. By changing the green pixels to yellow, Huawei claims to be able to capture 40% more light, with the yellow filter capturing the green and red light. Of course, this will make the color saturated, but Huawei says it can correct that in the software.

The front panel uses a nice standard notch design with a single 32 MP camera in the center of the screen. The screen is a 6.47-inch OLED with curved sides and a resolution of 2340 × 1080. An optical fingerprint reader is built into the screen and you will not find a headset anywhere because it is also integrated in the screen. Huawei does not explain this feature other than by the name "Huawei Sound Display Technology", but judging by the video presented by the company, it seems like an electronic magnet makes the screen vibrate to produce a sound.

The SoC is a Kirin 980 processor produced by Huawei. It is a 7-nm chip with two Cortex-A76 cores operating at 2.6 GHz, two others heaping at 1.92 GHz and four Cortex-A55 cores at 1.8 GHz. You can get a P30 Pro with 6 or 8 GB of RAM and storage options of 128 GB, 265 GB or 512 GB. The phone has an IP68 resistance to water and dust, an NFC technology, a charging without wire, a wired charging of 40 W (!) And a battery of 4200 mAh.

If you want to dive into the Huawei P30 Pro, it is available from 999 €.

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