Reviews11.04.2021

Impressive new Huawei Mate 40 Pro – a pocket-sized DSLR

After the recent Huawei Mate 40 Pro launch, MyBroadband got the chance to take the new flagship smartphone for a spin and see how the camera performs.

Huawei has a reputation of manufacturing high-quality cameras in its smartphones, and the Mate 40 Pro is no exception.

The phone features the Leica Ultra Vision triple camera setup on the back, consisting of a 50MP primary camera, 20MP ultra-wide camera, and a 12MP periscope lens.

The front camera pairs a 13MP 1/1.28-inch sensor with a fixed focus lens that helps with depth-sensing in bokeh mode.

The image below shows the position and specifications of each lens.

Huawei’s camera engineers have been hard at work on improving its already impressive smartphone cameras.

The 50MP main camera sports a large 1/1.28-inch sensor with an RYYB Bayer type colour filter, as well as an f/1.9-aperture and a 23mm equivalent focal length.

Like the main camera, the 20MP ultra-wide camera recognizes autofocus. It has a 1.8mm field of view and a native 3:2 ratio, rather than the more squarish 4:3 ratio seen on most smartphones.

The 12MP periscope lens features a f/3.4-aperture, and delivers a minimum of 5x optical zoom, 10x hybrid zoom and a maximum of 50x digital zoom.

As you would expect from a flagship smartphone, the camera captures good exposure and manages to retain a broad dynamic range, even in low light.

Its built-in autofocus system provides improved sharpness and a decent texture-to-noise ratio, capturing photos with crisp detail and low levels of noise.

While taking photos in Night Mode, the Mate 40 Pro captures more saturated colours and does an excellent job of preserving texture.

Users can manually adjust the camera’s ISO up to 6,400 and handle shutter speeds up to 1/4,000th of a second.

Through the use of white balance, the automatic mode has two levels of processing – live preview and polishing. Within a few seconds after the photo is taken, the image will alter before your eyes.

Despite the lack of optical stabilisation, the Mate 40 Pro excels in dynamic range, retaining highlights even in low light situations.

With the device’s portrait mode, autofocusing, shooting modes, and macro photography, it is hard to distinguish between the device and a DSLR camera.