The primary camera in the P30 Pro is based on a new image sensor that, Huawei’s Kevin Hu tells India Today Tech, has been developed in partnership with Sony.
Over here in Paris where Huawei launched the P30 Pro and the P30 on Tuesday, the company’s senior executives can’t stop talking about the four-camera system in their Pro phone. They are incredibly proud of it, and I believe for the right reasons. The Huawei P30 Pro camera system has a lot of new technologies that are unique to it, and at least on paper it looks like a phone that is indeed “rewriting the rules of photography”.
But are the four cameras really that good in the P30 Pro? I don’t have a definite answer right now because I haven’t yet used the P30 Pro long enough to say that it dethrones the Pixel 3 as the top camera smartphone. But from whatever time I have spent so far, it is easy to see that there is some substance in the talk by Huawei. The P30 Pro camera is versatile and it does seem to offer features like that long 5X (125mm) zoom lens and those crazy high ISO values that seem to be very useful.
But before I talk of the photos that the P30 Pro clicks, a quick overview of its camera system.
— The primary camera in the P30 Pro is based on a new image sensor that, Huawei’s Kevin Hu tells India Today Tech, has been developed in partnership with Sony. This is a relatively large image sensor with size of 1/1.7 inches. This sensor is paired with a F1.6 lens. By default the P30 Pro clicks 10-megapixel images with this sensor, using pixel binning technology top combine four pixels into one better pixel.
— Then there is a wide-angle camera, which uses a 16mm lens with F2.2 aperture and a 20-megapixel image sensor.
— The third camera is what Huawei calls Periscope camera. It uses a big 125mm lens. This is a sort of technology breakthrough in smartphone photography because putting focal length of 125mm in a phone is no joke. The Periscope camera uses a 8-megapixel image sensor and its lens has an aperture of F3.4, which is less wider than a F2.4 or F1.8 lens common to smartphones but then as the focal length goes up it is inevitable that somewhere the laws of physics will kick in.
— These 3 cameras click photos. But there is another camera in the P30 Pro, alongside these three, that only records the data related to how quickly light travels between the phone and the subject. This data is then used to create better photos by the camera software inside the P30 Pro.
