The camera that can ring home

Auckland Harbour Bridge, taken from Northcote Point, with partial zoom. Photo / Bill Bennett.

Huawei's latest release makes big strides in the biggest smartphone factor - photography. By Bill Bennett

If we're going to be strict with our language, then Huawei's P30 Pro is a mobile phone.

Some people might say smartphone. With a familiar glass slab design and a bright full-size screen, it looks like most people's idea of a modern phone.

What those labels and looks don't tell you is that the P30 Pro is also a formidable pocket camera.

It has to be. Photography is the arena where mobile phone makers vie for supremacy. Phones have reached the point where all premium models are good at calls, web surfing or running apps.

Photography is where there's the most difference between phone brands. It's also where there is the most headroom left for further improvement.

You get a lot of camera with the P30 Pro, or, to be more precise, a lot of cameras. There are five in total. It is the first phone to feature four cameras clustered on the back as well as a front-facing selfie camera.

Four cameras may sound like overkill. Yet they work together to deliver exceptional images. Among other things, they mean Huawei's phone can take stunning night-time shots.

What's more, the phone's software automates most of the hard work when it comes to taking photos. That leaves you with the task of pointing and clicking. Until now you've needed to spend a lot more money on a digital SLR to do this kind of work.

The P30 Pro is also the first phone to have 5x optical zoom. Until now this was only available on more expensive and bulkier SLR cameras.

Adding 5x optical zoom to a slim phone needed an original approach. You need physical depth to arrange the series of lenses needed to get this level of optical zoom. That's hard on a pocketable phone that is only 8.5mm deep.

Huawei and its camera technology partner Leica used a prism to achieve this. The prism deflects light 90 degrees sideways though a periscope. The arrangement burrows a channel sideways through the body of the phone. Engineers hid the telephoto lens inside the case.

Until now most phone makers have offered little more than digital zoom. Digital means cropping, then enlarging remaining pixels to give the appearance of zooming. This approach often loses image data along the way. That's rarely an issue when you capture tens of millions of pixels. You rarely need all those pixels in the finished image.

The P30 Pro's main camera has a 40-megapixel image sensor. There's also a 20-megapixel ultrawide angle camera.

Huawei adds what it calls a SuperSpectrum sensor. Most camera sensors divide incoming light into red, green and blue. The SuperSpectrum sensor adds yellow. This lets in much more light, Huawei says up to 40 per cent more. More light means much better low-light pictures.

Software combines data from these cameras with the telephone lens pixels to give 10x hybrid zoom.

Huawei says this process is lossless, which is debatable, but true in a sense. Either way, you can shoot quality 10x zoom images that compare with those from optical cameras. You may get better 10x zoom from an SLR, but it won't be cheap.

On paper the P30 Pro can zoom all the way up to 50x. In practice the image quality starts to worsen once you get to around 30-35x zoom. There's another problem. If you shoot distant objects, you need to hold the camera very still. Zoom amplifies any movement.

In practice, I found it was fine taking night time pictures without zoom and with 5x or 10x zoom.

Auckland Harbour Bridge, taken from Little Shoal Bay. Without zoom, and picked up colour without flash. Photo / Bill Bennett.

When I cranked up the zoom to capture Sky Tower, it wasn't possible to hold steady enough to keep the tower in the image. Mind you, we're talking about an object that's almost 5km distant and I took the pictures at night. You couldn't attempt this using any other phone.

Auckland Harbour Bridge, taken from Little Shoal Bay. With partial zoom, and picked up colour without flash. Photo / Bill Bennett.

One interesting feature of the P30 Pro's night photography is the way it picks up colour that the human eye can't see. I was shooting test pictures in blackness without a flash.
Yet the camera managed to find green grass, some blue in the sky and even some of that sky blue reflected on harbour. That'll be the SuperSpectrum sensor in action.

SuperSpectrum sensor in action. Photo / Bill Bennett.

At NZ$1500, the P30 Pro is a big investment for most people. If taking night pictures or zoom shots is important to you, it's worth paying the extra.