Taking photos with our smartphones is something we do every day and the new Huawei P30 Pro offers incredible new photographic abilities no other smartphone has been able to achieve before.
Tech Guide has taken a hands on look at the P30 Pro in Paris and put the incredible camera through its paces.
Design-wise the P30 Pro is pretty slick with a stunning 6.47-inch curved OLED display that includes a small notch for the 32-megapixel front facing camera.
On the back panel of the three Leica lenses and, beneath the flash, is the small TOF (time-of-flight lens.
Despite having such a large screen, the P30 Pro doesn’t feel too large in your hands. It’s also pretty thin and light.
The unit we were using was the Breathing Crystal colour which has shades of purple and blue and white that reflects hypnotically in the light.
The P30 Pro is also available in Aurora – which is a bluish purple colour.
But our main focus with this hands-on session was to put the P30 Pro’s camera through its paces.
It is easily one of the best smartphone cameras we’ve ever used.
The AI mode does all the heavy lifting when taking your pictures because it can examine the scene, determine what’s in front of the camera whether it’s an object or an animal or whatever and then apply the correct settings and mode to produce excellent picture.
The device basically does a real-time Photoshop job on your picture before you’ve even taken it.
The onboard SuperSpectrum sensor also does a remarkable job with its nuanced light sensitivity.
When aiming the P30 Pro at the scene it could detect blue sky, greenery, flowers, historical buildings, animals and, of course, people.
The Leica quad camera system combines superbly to not only offer great quality but also various fields of view as well.
For example, we were standing in front of the iconic Notre Dame church here in Paris and with the regular lens struggled to fit the building in the frame.
But switching to the ultrawide lens solved the problem instantly and we were able to easily fit the church in the image as well as its surroundings.
But another remarkable feature of the P30 Pro is the zoom.
It can offer 5x optical using its periscope lens system and take that to 10x hybrid zoom and then all the way up to 50x zoom.
We couldn’t believe how well this camera could get closer to your subject even at the full 50x zoom.
The first example was of a man on his balcony from quite a distance away. You can see the man circled in the image with no zoom at all.
We were then able to zoom in at the full 50x level and still managed to maintain a steady shot and a picture of the man with reasonable sharpness.
We gave this another go when we spotted the Eiffel Tower in the distance.
Again we went for the 50x zoom and managed to get close to the top of the tower as you can see from the images above.
That was an extreme use of the zoom but you still get pretty impressive results.
What continually impressed us was the amazing colour camera produced including brilliant blues, greens and warm red.
You can see from the images were captured in Paris that the blue sky was a standout as was the colourful flowers, grass and trees.
The P30 Pro also nailed flesh tones particularly in the excellent portrait mode which put your subject in brilliant sharpness while tastefully blurring the background.
Shooting in low light is also an incredible strength of the P30 Pro.
With your shooting outside at night or inside in dark spaces, the P30 can produce some truly amazing results.
We were able to shoot a model in a totally dark room and the resulting image in the regular photo mode wasn’t too bad a result considering the almost totally dark room.
But when we switch to Night Mode, the results were breathtaking.
As you can see from our images, the Night Mode shot looks like the room was professionally lit.
We will also able to capture a stunning shot of the Eiffel Tower at night from a moving car and still able to take a sharp image of the structure with the P30 Pro.
That image was actually taken while driving through the vehicles open sunroof (don’t worry, I was a passenger not the driver).
Huawei has yet again delivered a stunning improvement with the P30 Pro.
If you value the ability to capture excellent images on the go with your smartphone, the Huawei P30 Pro will be hard to beat.
* Stephen Fenech travelled to Paris as a guest of Huawei
