Of course, any premium Huawei flagship phone usually lands on DxOmark ahead of launch. It means a camera review will be ready as soon as the top Chinese OEM unveils the new product. The new Mate 40 series was introduced yesterday with two variants: the Huawei Mate 40 Pro and the Mate 40 Pro+. Recently reviewed is the Huawei Mate 40 Pro Camera that got a mobile score of 136. That makes it the highest so far among the latest flagship phones reviewed, beating the Xiaomi Mi 10 Ultra’s previous score of 133.
We’re not surprised about the results. Huawei’s cameras, at least, of its premium phones, always receive top scores. We’re guessing the Huawei P50 will someday overtake the Mate 40 Pro. It’s all about the camera performance–with or without its ties with Google.
Let’s take a look at the key camera specs. The phone only has three rear cams: a 50MP primary shooter with f/1.9-aperture lens and full-pixel Octa-PD; 20MP ultra-wide with f/1.8-aperture lens and PDAF; and a 12MP tele lens with f/3.4-aperture, PDAF, and OIS. There is an LED flash plus 4K video recording capability that can reach 2160p/60fps. A multispectral color temperature sensor is also mentioned.
The smartphone offers a lot of great promises. It delivers a wide dynamic range even in low light conditions. In bright light/indoor conditions, you may see the excellent texture and noise trade-off.
You can also expect the following: fast and accurate AF for photo and video, good detail at most tele-zoom settings, and good depth estimation in bokeh mode (even in complex scenes). Night shots show a fairly wide dynamic range.
When it comes to videos, expect excellent video stabilization, low noise levels on outdoor/indoor videos, as well as, accurate white balance, and pleasant color rendering on videos.
The phone isn’t perfect. The field of view on ultra-wide camera is comparatively narrow. There’s also color quantization and aliasing artifacts. Tele-zoom images are often out of focus.
Unfortunately, for video recording, there may be slight underexposure and limited dynamic range. Some videos may show Occasional ghosting artifacts and color quantization. Also noticeable is variation in sharpness between frames when walking while recording video in low light.
