Huawei Mate 30 Pro: The new low light master

Note: This article was first published on 25 September 2019.

The latest in Smartphone camera trickery

It’s been half a year since the launch of the P30 Pro, and that certainly blew us away with its periscope zoom lens, and various computational photography advancements. Chief of which was the 40MP SuperSpectrum sensor. That used a RYYB (Red Yellow Yellow Blue) Bayer filter array instead of the usual RGGB (Red Green Green Blue) one for better light sensitivity.

That, along with their improvements in computational photography allowed the P30 Pro to turn some stunning low-light images. At this point, you could be forgiven for thinking Huawei’s engineers would call it a day and hold back onto their set of technological goodies till next year. But no. They’ve instead gone and upped the ante once more with the Mate 30 Pro.

You see, where the P30 Pro is chockful of photography magic, the Mate 30 Pro is pushing forward with video ones. With the Mate 30 Pro, Huawei is claiming the world’s highest frame rate on a smartphone and the highest low light sensitivity for video on a smartphone. And that’s all thanks to their new Ultra-wide Cine camera.

This uses a larger 1/1.54 inch type sensor that supports ultra-wide angle video at ISO 51,200 and Ultra Slow-motion video at 7,680 fps, as well as 4K Ultra-wide Angle low-light time-lapse video. Pair that with what looks to be the same 40MP SuperSensing camera found on the P30 Pro, and you get what Huawei calls a 40MP Cine Camera system. It does up to 4K 60fps recording, can add Real-time Bokeh effects to video, and has Dual OIS (Optical image stabilization) and AIS (Artificial Image Stabilization) for more stable recording.

Here’s the entire camera system for the Mate 30 Pro:-

• 40MP (18mm, f/1.8) Cine camera
• 40MP (27mm, f/1.6) SuperSensing camera
• 8MP Telephoto camera (80mm, f/2.4, OIS)
• 3D Depth Sensing camera.

The camera system has a 45x Zooming range – Ultra-wide, 3x Optical, and 30x Digital – and covers the equivalent of an 18-80mm lens in 35mm full-frame terms. Maximum ISO for stills is 409,600.

At this point, it’s worth noting that the regular Mate 30 (non-Pro) has an upgraded camera system too. It has a SuperSensing Triple Camera system that includes a 40MP SuperSensing Wide Camera (27mm, f/1.8), a 16MP UltraWide Camera (17mm f/2.2), and an 8MP Telephoto Camera (80mm, f/2.4, OIS). It gets a Laser Focus Module instead of the 3D Depth Sensing one found in the Pro, and boasts the same 45x Zooming range but with a lower maximum ISO for stills of 204,800 and a minimum focusing distance of just 2.5cm.

How good is the new Zoom?

The sample photographs below were shot with the Huawei Mate 30 Pro. The photos have not been post-processed and are copyright to SPH Magazines. They are provided for your reference only and we ask that you do not reproduce them elsewhere. Click the picture for full resolution image.

Pretty good actually, provided you stay within reasonable limits. We took captures with the Mate 30 Pro at 0.6x Zoom (ultra-wide), 1.0x Zoom (standard), 3.0x Zoom (optical), 5.0x (Hybrid), 10.0x, (Digital) and 30.0x (Digital) just to see how the camera fared.

We’d say images taken at up to 5.0x Hybrid zoom remain very usable, with decent detail retained even at 100% zoom. We wouldn’t go beyond 10.0x Zoom though, as at this point fine detail is going to mush.

At 30x digital zoom? Well, we’d just use this as a binoculars for scoping ahead. There’s limited detail left at this point, and the image looks more like a watercolour painting than a photograph. Still, considering this is stuffing the equivalent of 810mm lens into a tiny smartphone, the result remains impressive.

Something worth noting is that Huawei seems to have fixed the colour discrepancy issues we first saw on the P30 Pro. Exposure and colour balance are pretty even as we shift between cameras, with it becoming just slightly brighter at 5.0x zoom when the darker interior of the monument takes up a bigger proportion of the frame.

And images in low light?

These are pretty good too. As you can see from the two frames below, the images captured are pretty much free from noise – even at ISO 12,800. That’s pretty remarkable given how much smaller the sensor is compared to a typical interchangeable lens camera.

One thing to note is that you do have to prepare to hold still for longer if you’re not setting shutter speeds for yourself as the Mate 30 Pro takes additional captures to aid in the computation of low light shots. With the shot from the aeroplane, in particular, the reflection of the woman behind isn’t even visible to the naked eye as all the cabin lights were off, so it’s impressive that the camera even picked that up in darkness.

Video features

Ultra Slow-motion

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Now here’s where the Mate 30 Pro really shines. Slow-Motion capture comes under the 'More' tab in the camera, and the Mate 30 Pro lets you do anything from 4x (120fps) to 256x (7,680fps) capture. Captures beyond 32x slow-motion start with a box in the center of the frame that you can move and resize.

This acts as an optical trigger so the instant the camera detects motion in the frame, it starts capturing. For movements too small (like the flapping of the bee’s wings below), you can deactivate the window and start capture manually. As you can see, it’s only a 35-second capture, but the results are quite impressive. Almost like having National Geographic filming capabilities in your pocket!

4K Time-lapse video

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Time-lapse isn’t exactly a new thing, but there aren’t many smartphones out there that let you do 4K time-lapse without needing additional software. The Mate 30 Pro lets you create time-lapse either in full Auto mode, full Manual mode, or by choosing either the desired Recording Speed, or the desired Recording Duration.

That’s certainly more intuitive than trying to determine the number of frames and working in reverse, as some cameras would have you do. In fact, the Mate 30 Pro even prompts you by telling you what subjects are ideal for which recording speeds, making your selection easier.

The fact that smartphones can be easily charged by a battery pack and the relatively lower power consumption compared to full-sized interchangeable lens cameras makes this quite an attractive option.

AI Colour effect

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Here’s something that doesn’t quite work as well though. The AI Colour effect attempts to gives you more separation between your subjects and the background by only rendering people in colour. Everything else is captured in black and white.

As you can see from the video, it does work to a certain extent, but because there is no way to define a subject with this feature, the masking just fails when you have multiple people in the scene. It also appears that the colour effect is subject to changes as the distance varies, so it could be a difference of mere steps before the person in colour would go black and white.

In all fairness, this effect is more commonly seen in photographs, as it would otherwise require the frames to be painstakingly painted by hand. So it’s really quite an ambitious thing Huawei is trying to do here. Perhaps it might work better if you were able to at least fix a particular person as the target?

Live Video bokeh

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We’ve all become accustomed to software bokeh for photographs now, but for video? That would certainly be a pipe-dream for film-makers. As with the AI Colour effect above though, it seems Huawei’s trying to do a little too much with AI. There’s again no way for you to choose the subject of the filter, and no way to adjust the level of bokeh either. In contrast, the Samsung Galaxy Note10, which actually debuted this feature first, has a better implementation at this point in time.

Conclusion

Make no mistake, the Mate 30 Pro’s camera system is certainly a revolutionary one. By smartly incorporating two larger-than-usual sensors, Huawei has created a video-focused counterpart to the P30 Pro’s obvious photography focus ones.

And the results are equally impressive. Colours are accurate, and the camera adjusts for changing exposures quickly and accurately so you no longer have the issue of colours being drastically different when moving from one camera to another.

From what we’ve seen, the larger sensor of the Ultra-wide Cine camera definitely makes a difference in terms of low light capture and sensitivity. If anything, the improved slow-motion capture mode has no equal among other smartphones in the market, so that certainly puts it one rung above the rest.

We’d love to see how it compares to the camera modules on other recently released smartphones like the Samsung Galaxy Note10+ and the iPhone 11 Pro Max, but that will have to come in a later article after the Pixel 4 gets launched too.

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