Huawei Mate 20 Pro beats iPhone XS Max, Galaxy Note 9 and Pixel 3 in Camera quality

Break down of Mate 20 Pro camera score

Photo

Huawei by far has been the only company to use the triple camera in a cohesive manner, which is evident from the rating and results. Still, images show pleasant colors, good exposure, and fantastic dynamic range. The well-balanced approach results in detail retention and noise reduction. Thanks to its 3x optical zoom lens, the Mate 20 Pro is also one of the best smartphones for taking zoomed in pictures.

However, the Mate 20 Pro does have some shortcomings. For example, its front camera compared to its competitors is mediocre primarily because of the beautification and over-softening of the image. This highlights a major flaw in Huawei’s smartphone camera and that is the absence of quality computational photography, unlike the Google Pixel lineup.

Video

The Huawei Mate 20 Pro achieves a very good Video score of 97 points, just one point below the P20 Pro. Its only real weak points are the stabilization that generates a noticeable drift, and noise in low light. We calculate the overall video score using the following video sub-scores: Exposure (84), Color (90), Autofocus (98), Texture (58), Noise (78), Artifacts (84), and Stabilization (92).

The focus of the smartphone manufacturers in camera category was divided in 2017 and 2018, where some companies preferred superior hardware technology while other companies, mainly Google, focused on computational photography and stressed less on the hardware side of the spectrum. However, the latest change in camera rating and numerous leaks suggest that 2019 will be the year of triple-lens, tetra-lens, and Penta-lens camera setup. Who knows, we might even see a Pixel phone with a dual or triple rear-camera setup.