Huawei is going through a difficult time because of the US veto that prevents companies like Google sell or license its technology to the Chinese company. However, Huawei is not willing to give up and recently announced its new flagship Huawei Mate 30 Pro, which comes with impressive hardware but without the services of Google or Play Store.
The Huawei Mate 30 Pro comes with a curved 6.5 ″ OLED screen, Kirin 990 processor, 8GB of RAM, 256GB of storage, 40MP + 40MP + 8MP + ToF quad-rear camera, 32MP front camera and 4,500 mAh battery with a fast charge at 40W.
The Huawei Mate 30 Pro is not yet for sale in some countries but, if there are no surprises, it will reach the market for an official price of € 1,029.
Huawei Mate 30 Pro Photo camera
The Huawei Mate 30 comes with a rear camera with four lenses that offer great versatility as they cover a wide range of focal distances.
Below we can see the technical details of the three main cameras since the fourth camera is a 3D ToF sensor to measure depth.
Starting with the main camera, Huawei uses a 1 / 1.7” RYYB sensor with a lens with f / 1.6 aperture and optical stabilization. It is a very wide opening that allows a large amount of light to pass through, which should produce better snapshots in low light conditions.
As it did in the Huawei P30 Pro (https://igraduate.co/huawei-p30-pro-in-depth-review-price-and-opinion/), Huawei has replaced the traditional RGBG color filter (Red, 2 x Green and Blue) used by other manufacturers with an RYYB filter (Red, 2 x Yellow and Blue). In the words of Huawei, changing the color filter allows you to increase the range of colors captured by the sensor and, especially, the amount of light that reaches the sensor.
Huawei Mate 30 Pro is able to take excellent shots with good color, great sharpness, and high dynamic range, in good light conditions.
In backlight conditions or scenes with an important mixture of lights and shadows, the Huawei Mate 30 Pro is able to balance the exposure so that all areas of the image are perfectly visible.
The Huawei Mate 30 Pro is capable of shooting at a maximum ISO sensitivity of 409,600. Although shooting at such high ISO values produces a lot of noise, the fact that it is possible to do so is a sample of its photographic capabilities.
In low light conditions, the main camera of the Huawei Mate 30 Pro offers excellent image quality, containing noise well and preserving a high level of detail even in complicated situations. The colors of the photographs remain alive and true to reality.
The use of Artificial Intelligence in photography is key for Huawei and, therefore, the Huawei Mate 30 Pro includes some functionalities such as AI HDR + and AI Segmentation , which adjust the exposure of a photograph taken backlit or in low light by areas, identifying in a way smart for which areas you should increase or decrease the brightness depending on whether they are in the foreground or in the background, for example.
One of the improvements brought about by AI is the long exposure shooting with Night mode, which allows you to take night photos without a brighter tripod.
The captures in Night mode have a level of illumination superior to those taken with the normal mode, so it is a useful mode for those occasions in which we want the scene to look brighter than it really is. I also detect a more orange tone in the pictures taken in Night mode.
The Huawei Mate 30 Pro offers an image with good sharpness, without noise, and with realistic colors, although all the high-end smartphones compared to offer a very similar image quality.
The contrast between the darkness of the street and the lighting of the establishment interior is also well resolved in the Huawei Mate 30 Pro, and we can distinguish something from the interior.
The ultra-wide-angle camera has a standard RGB sensor with 40MP resolution and lens with f / 1.8 aperture, which is also a fairly wide value. It does not have optical stabilization but this is not so necessary since, having such a large angle, the small movements of the hand do not translate into such large displacements in pixels.
This camera provides great versatility when it comes to capturing photographs of landscapes or architecture.
Personally, I find the ultra-wide-angle camera very useful since it allows you to take much more spectacular photographs than the normal camera.
The telephoto camera reaches a 3x optical zoom (and 5x hybrid), below the 5x optical zoom with a periscopic camera that we saw in the Huawei P30 Pro. Although some may think that this is a step back, in my opinion, it is a very wise decision.
Unlike compact cameras or SLRs with variable zoom, smartphones cameras have a fixed focal length (80 mm, that is, 3x), so that any other focal length less than that of the telephoto camera is achieved by extending software the image taken by the main camera (27 mm) , without taking advantage of the telephoto camera at all.
Since normally we do not need to expand up to 5x, in my opinion having a camera with 3x zoom (or even 2x) is better than 5x, unless the use you are going to give the phone is to photograph distant objects such as animals, airplanes, details of architecture, etc.
Another aspect that should be known is that, in low light conditions, the Huawei Mate 30 Pro, like other smartphones, dispense with the zoom camera and choose to enlarge the image of the main camera.
This is because the telephoto camera has a fairly limited aperture with respect to the main camera, so in low light, the image is seen with too much grain. In these circumstances, it is better to enlarge the image taken with the main camera than to capture with the zoom camera.
The fourth camera is a ToF sensor that allows you to determine the depth thanks to the measurement of the time it takes for the light to be reflected by the lenses. The main utility of this camera is to improve portrait-type photography thanks to a more precise distance measurement although it is also used for Augmented Reality (AR).
Thanks to this sensor and image processing, the Huawei Mate 30 Pro is capable of creating depth layers and applying differentiated bokeh effects for each layer of the Aperture and Portrait modes.
The opening mode allows re-adjust the lens aperture between f /0.95 and f / 16 at any time, even after having taken the picture.
The Portrait mode also blurs the background when we take a picture of a person and also adjusts the color for the skin tone of the face. However, in Portrait mode, we cannot adjust the depth of the field afterward.
What we can do in Portrait mode is to modify the shape of the bokeh (circles, hearts, swirl, discs) and adjust the beauty level from 0 to 10.
By default, the Portrait mode uses the main camera (wide angle), so the result when taking close-up photographs (close-ups) is that the face is somewhat deformed. The best portraits are taken with a telephoto lens of about 50 mm (2x zoom), but in this case, the telephoto objective lens is 80 mm (3x zoom), so we will have to move a little further to take the portrait.
The Huawei Mate 30 Pro also uses algorithms based on Artificial Intelligence for real-time recognition of thousands of scenes, being able to segment different objects into a single photograph. Colors, brightness, and contrast are automatically adjusted for each item.
Depending on the scene detected, different camera settings are applied to enhance the image. For example, if you are taking food photography, switch to Food mode that saturates the colors and raises the contrast, while if the sky occupies an important part, the Blue Sky mode enhances the blue color of the sky.
If you don’t want to use the shooting mode proposed by the AI, you can easily discard it by simply pressing on ‘x’.
The front camera of the Huawei Mate 30 Pro has a 32MP sensor with an f / 2.0 aperture lens, but it lacks autofocus, so it only focuses at a fixed distance.
Although it does not have a front flash, it is able to illuminate the screen in a very intense white color by taking a selfie to emulate the presence of a flash.
The quality of the selfies is high. Other smartphones have a less dynamic range and the background skies look white but the Huawei Mate 30 Pro correctly exposes the entire image.
Now, as usual with these cameras, the quality decreases when we are in low light situations.
The front camera also offers a Portrait mode in selfies that applies the bokeh effect to blur the background of the image.
Huawei has paid special attention to video recording on this smartphone since it is not only possible to record good videos with the main camera but also with the ultra-wide-angle. In addition, for the first time on a Huawei smartphone, we can record video at 4K @ 60fps.
An interesting aspect is that it is possible to select if we want to save the videos in the traditional H.264 format or in the more modern H.265 format, which reduces the size of the videos without decreasing quality but is not as compatible.
At night, the recording of night videos with the main camera offers pretty good quality.
The ultra-wide-angle camera of the Huawei Mate 30 Pro is called Cine Camera, so it has been designed with video recording in mind. It has a large sensor size 1 / 1.54 ″ with a maximum video ISO of 51,200, which allows you to capture videos even in low light conditions.
Huawei has also included some video effects that make use of AI to, for example, separate the subject from the background.
The Huawei Mate 30 Pro does a pretty good job of separating the person we are recording from the background, and blur the background of the image – all this in real-time during video recording, without any further processing – in comparison with previous models.
Finally, Huawei has incorporated an impressive super slow motion capture mode that is capable of recording video at 720P up to 7,680 fps (256x).
At this rate, it is possible to record only 0.12 seconds, which is translated in 30 seconds when we play it at 30 fps. We can start recording manually or let it start automatically when the phone detects movement in a frame.
Huawei Mate 30 Pro Voice calls
Huawei Mate 30 Pro has several microphones with noise cancellation to eliminate background noise and improve sound quality during calls.
The Calls and Contacts application is the same, with separate tabs for the dialer, contact list and favorites.
Read full Huawei Mate 30 Pro In-depth Analysis:
- Part 01: Huawei Mate 30 Pro In-depth Analysis – Design and Screen.
- Part 02: Huawei Mate 30 Pro In-depth Analysis – Hardware and Battery.
- Part 03: Huawei Mate 30 Pro In-depth Analysis – Software.
- Part 04: Huawei Mate 30 Pro In-depth Analysis – Applications included and Multimedia.
- Part 05: Huawei Mate 30 Pro In-depth Analysis – Photo Camera and Voice Calls.
- Part 06: Huawei Mate 30 Pro In-depth Analysis – Price and Competitors
All Image credits: Huawei Mate 30 Pro
