Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Huawei P20 Pro Review: The Triple Camera Smartphone!”.
Oh hey, what is up guys mkbhd here so nowadays it seems like it’s never quite enough to just nail all the pillars of a great smartphone and put it out. It seems like. Not only do you have to do all of that, but you have to take one of them and push it to the absolute extreme, the maximum, and so this is what it looks like when you nail all the pillars of a great smartphone and then take one Of them and take it to the next level, this is the huawei p20 pro. So this is one of those phones. You’Ve either heard a lot about recently or never heard of definitely two camps with this one. This is not coming to the us and usually that stops me from even trying a phone in the first place, because i know i can’t recommend it for a lot of people, but this caught my attention, obviously like huawei phones in general, have just been getting my Attention more and more lately, but this one just captured it completely: it’s crazy new color, triple cameras on the back 4 000 milliamp hour battery 109 score on dxomark, so i picked it up. I used it. Here’S my thoughts so on the outside aesthetics wise. I do like this phone a lot. It has a couple flaws. It’S not perfect, but it’s one of the few really unique. Looking phones out there, of course, mainly because of this back this gradient color, i mean it’s a crazy, looking awesome back of the phone it blends from like this aqua green to blue to purple and in different amounts, depending on where you look at it from it, Looks different in everyone’s video, i’m kind of trying to do my best with the camera i have, but there’s other colors of the p20 and p20 pro i wouldn’t even consider them. This is definitely the coolest looking one.
It’S called twilight. It’S just weird that there’s a lot of text on the back of the phone. I would think it would look way cleaner. If all that wasn’t here, it might even look sick with like a logo tossed on there, but it wouldn’t be the end of the world.
This just is what it is: it’s a super, unique colorful and also fingerprint and dust magnet phone. I got your power button and your volume rocker on the same side. I know that doesn’t count as a colored power button huawei. I know you have a little bar there, but you have to have the whole button with some color good. Try, though, but the rest of this body is prime, it’s what you’d expect from a high-end 2018 flagship which it is so metal rails, curved edges. It’S ip67 water resistant, which is always nice. It’S definitely not too thin. You know feels solid in the hand nice weight it has an ir blaster which not every phone does now, but also no expandable storage and no headphone jack.
This camera bump is also mildly. Annoying to me, because it sticks out enough from the phone that it will rock on a table. I just i got ta point that out. Not all phones have that problem, but it’s not a deal breaker either, but really design wise. My biggest question mark is on the front of this phone uh, so it has a notch. So a notch is what you do in a phone in 2018 when you want to get rid of all the bezels, but you don’t quite have the technology to fully do so.
So you know the front-facing speaker, the selfie camera you got to keep them just make a little cut out around them. Fine, i get it, but this phone also has a fingerprint reader on the front and then a huge, empty chin bezel with nothing else in it. No buttons just a bezel like you’re, either trying to get rid of the bezel or you’re, not it’s weird that they would put a notch like they’re, trying to go totally bezel-less, but then also have a chin kind of make up your mind there. I feel like you could have made this look way better with an even top and bottom bezel, there’s even an option in the software to do exactly that, and it doesn’t look that bad but yeah. The fingerprint reader is on the front.
It’S still super fast. I don’t mind it being here: huawei does that maybe better than anyone still and it also acts as a gesture pad if you want to disable the on-screen buttons and get some extra screen real estate back, you can do that too. Your call, but above it all, is that pretty nice 6.1 inch oled display, with, of course, that notch that we talked about it’s a 2240 by 1080 panel.
So it’s a 18.7 by nine aspect ratio slightly taller than the normal tall, but the oled panel itself is pretty good. It gets bright enough to see outdoors with no problem. There’S no shift issues, it’s just not quite to the greatness level of like a samsung phone. It’S not quite as bright or as vibrant, but it’s right in line with what you’d expect from a flagship, oh and then it also packs in a 4 000 milliamp hour battery in a phone.
That’S not that thick! So that’s pretty great! This has been consistently five plus hours of screen on time, which, for my use, is excellent. So there’s no problem with battery here and i’ve been preaching like if you want to make a phone make it as thick as you want. No one really wants the phone to be that razor, thin and adding a couple extra millimeters for a sizeable battery is a great choice. I mean look at that. This phone is definitely not thick at all. Bravo to huawei definitely keep doing that.
So for the hardware look, it’s it’s all pretty! Damn good the specs inside pretty good! You know we’re looking at six gigs of ram 128 gigs of storage. The chipset is all right. We definitely have better things out here with qualcomm, but it’s still good enough and the experience of using this phone again it’ll come down to what you do with android. I won’t talk too long about emui, but those of you familiar with huawei know that this is their skin on top of android.
Here, with this one, it’s emui 8.1, based on top of android 8.1. So using it every day i gave it a shot again and it the more i use it the more it kind of reminds me of what samsung felt like a couple years ago or they’re, just basically throwing as many features as possible at you, because really there Are a lot of features in here, whether you use them all or not? You know, there’s backup and restore features. There’S big screen features. Multitasking features. There’S multiple power save modes with different intensities. You can adjust the screen resolution, which is in battery settings for some reason. Instead of display settings uh, there’s even a smart screenshot feature that won’t stop interrupting me, even though i’ve turned it off. It still randomly thinks some of my swipes and knocks are screenshot attempts and starts doing this magic animation.
Please stop doing that. Overall, you can fix or not use pretty much any of the things you don’t like, except for the visual changes. I’Ve been using it with nova launcher, as you can tell, but yeah they’re still going to have huawei’s icons and huawei’s quick settings and their multitasking ui, and all that and also you’re, going to be waiting for a couple. Apps, like instagram, for example, to play nice with that notch android p, when it gets released, is supposed to help a lot with that, but for now there’s definitely some bugs, but all right all right, i’m sure you knew when you saw this phone came out with A 40 megapixel main camera you knew it would grab my attention. You know why i’m here you knew when you put out a phone with not one not two but three cameras on the back, that it would turn my head.
You know why i’m here and you knew when this thing got a dxo mark score of a hundred and nine that i just couldn’t resist, picking it up and actually seeing what it’s all about. So, let’s take a deep look at why i was even interested in this phone in the first place, the cameras. So yes, the huawei p20 pro has three cameras on the back.
The main sensor is a 40 megapixel sensor with optical stabilization and an f 1.8 aperture. The secondary is a 20 megapixel monochrome sensor, also with optical image, stabilization and an f 1.6 aperture, and the third is an 8 megapixel, 3x telephoto lens again stabilized this time. F. 2.4.
So that’s a lot of numbers. Uh! The 40 megapixel sensor is huge and i don’t just mean like the megapixel count, is huge. I mean the actual physical size of the sensor.
It’S a one over 1.7 inch sensor, diagonally, that’s about twice the size of the galaxy s9 and the pixel 2 and the iphone 10 sensors. That’S half an inch diagonally damn. There are a lot of potential advantages to a physically larger sensor.
I use in my main, shooting a camera with a massive sensor. You get better low light sensitivity, bigger pixels, better overall performance, less gain a wider field of view. So i love the concept.
I love the idea of putting a big sensor in a smartphone camera, so how’d it turn out well right off the bat. The photos look pretty good. Not only is it a big sensor, it is a good sensor, so you get accurate colors.
A nice dynamic range plenty of detail and that’s really the main characteristic you’re going to notice about the p20 pro photos, lots of detail thanks to the sensor and the sharpening being aggressive as hell and then a shallow-ish depth of field thanks to the sensor size and The fixed wide aperture, but here’s some notes for you to consider about these cameras besides just pointing and shooting in auto mode, so number one. The main camera uses a quad bayer structure when taking photos, which means it’s a 40 megapixel sensor, but it’s outputting data binned in two by two blocks of pixels, so you’re getting an output image of 10 megapixel images. Still super sharp and detailed, but 10 megapixel photos number two. The video mode is really not that great, some might say trash like it can shoot stabilize 1080p video with decent color and detail, but because of the chip it’s using.
It can’t keep up with the stabilization of 4k. The 4k video really looks bad off of this phone. Sadly, i wish it was as complete of a video camera as it was a photo camera, but it’s not but number three. This whole camera is just fast. The whole experience of taking photos of it is fast which i love it has laser autofocus. It’S super quick, the time to open the camera and actually grab a shot is super snappy and you can even double press volume down to take a snapshot of what you’re pointing at in like .3 seconds.
But then you don’t really know like what you’re taking a picture of. So that’s, maybe a little extreme. But the point is it’s fast. Once you’re in the app you hit the telephoto zoom button, you get 3x or 5x with a single touch. It all works. For me, and then ai okay, i there’s a lot of people, keep asking about the ai all over this phone, but especially in the camera about you know why? Don’T people give it enough credit in the videos? It’S a big deal.
It makes better than others i’ll. Tell you exactly why i’ve used it. It’S pretty straightforward. Basically, there’s a trigger to turn on ai and the camera it’s on by default and when it’s on, if you give it a second in the viewfinder, it tries to identify everything you take a photo of and then automatically enhance some predetermined things.
It thinks you’ll like about that photo and it’s right about identifying what you’re trying to take a photo of more often than not like you take a photo of the sky. It puts it in blue sky mode. Take a picture of greenery puts it in greenery mode, flower mode, pet mode, everything it just. It knows pretty much instantly, but then it’s the improvements that it decides to make once it knows what you’re taking a photo of that are pretty basic like in greenery mode.
For example, if you’re taking a photo of a plant – and it has green in it – it turns on greenery mode and it just basically blasts the green channel in the plants and makes it look more green cool in blue sky mode. It does the same thing if you point it at like a skyline and there’s blue in the sky. It knows it’s blue sky and it just blasts. The blue channel makes the sky really blue. Like i cool, that’s i’m glad it worked, but maybe i don’t even want that to be more blue. I just want a picture of what i’m taking a picture of. I don’t know, maybe i’m not the normal smartphone photo taker, but i don’t want automatic enhancement. Has never been my thing, i i turned it off pretty quick. I usually just want to take a photo straight from the sensor, which looks pretty good and maybe use that ai later for, like sorting through my photos or making them easier to find but yeah a lot of the p20 pro’s photos.
You know they don’t need any editing or enhancing, because they look great straight off the sensor. I mean i’m talking effortless shallow depth of field, a plus detail, like i said from all those megapixels. I just wish the processing wasn’t so aggressive.
Sometimes it looks a little too sharp. Such a big sensor should also have a great advantage in low light, but when you compare it to smaller sensor, cameras like i did, the low light photos are cleaner, yes, but they also have a ton of smoothing and noise reduction, because the processing is so aggressive. It almost feels like the software is holding back the hardware. So when i’m comparing like these two and i’m after the absolute best smartphone camera, the pixel is taking often much better photos more consistently. Because of the software i mean. There’S definitely still things p20 pro can do that pixel can’t, especially with that 3x telephoto zoom. That can be really great, but if what you’re after is the best overall smartphone photos, the answer is still pixel 2 and i think anyone who shot with both of these would agree. So, at the end of the day, p20 pro is my favorite huawei phone. Yet obviously, no doubt it’s kind of a bummer that is not coming to the us.
It would be cool to see i’m still a fan of a lot of the choices they’ve made here. Design wise build quality, wise and i got ta say even emui – is better than it’s ever been, but it’s not quite enough to convince me to switch to it full time if the camera and the software and the build are the biggest draws to this phone. It’S definitely going to have the build beat.
I mean this is a one-of-a-kind like back of a phone for sure, but if the camera and software are both better on another phone, it’s remarkable how many times i keep going back to pixel 2, but for now i’ll give p20 pro, like a 45 degree thumbs Up pretty good, not bad, i’m a fan of the decisions and i’m looking forward to p30 until the next one. Thanks for watching talk to you guys later peace, .