The Huawei P30 & P30 Pro Reviews: Photography Enhanced
by Andrei Frumusanu on April 18, 2019 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Mobile
- Smartphones
- Huawei
- P30
- P30 Pro
System Performance
System performance of the new P30s is expected to be excellent. In essence, there shouldn’t be any large difference to the Mate 20’s and the recent Honor View20. All of the aforementioned devices sport the same Kirin 980 chipset as the P30s, and there shouldn’t be any major software differences in the new flagship phones.
Indeed, in PCMark, the P30 and P30 Pro tie in with the recent Huawei flagships, showcasing only minor deviations in the scores.
Interestingly, we see a slightly larger uplift in the web benchmarks, however I found this not to be caused by an increase in performance of the devices themselves but rather seemingly an update in the OS WebView of Android, as re-testing the Mate 20 again showcases the same increased performance figures.
Overall, the P30 and P30 Pro perform identically to the Mate 20 and Mate 20 Pro – excellently. There’s still instances where Qualcomm (& new Exynos S10) devices perform notably better, such as app opening or activity switching. I think this is due to Huawei’s possible lack of framework boosters.
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Andrei Frumusanu - Thursday, April 18, 2019 - link
The sensor should be in 4:1 binning mode, otherwise the dynamic range would be much worse.No 10-bit HDR or HDR recording.
4K30: 40Mbps AVC High@5.1 // 25Mbps HEVC High@L5
FHD60: 25Mbps AVC High@4.2 // 16Mbps HEVC Main@4.1
The bit-rates are quite low.
eastcoast_pete - Thursday, April 18, 2019 - link
Thanks Andrei! The low bit rates are unfortunate, and likely hurt the quality of the video. If you still have the P30 Pro, could you try the Android app "Open Camera" and see if that allows for higher bit rate recording?In general, I don't get why so many phone manufacturers are hamstringing even their flagships like that. At least give users the option of recording at higher bit rate. These days, even many affordable mainstream microSD cards support write speeds of 60 Mb/s and up.
Andrei Frumusanu - Friday, April 19, 2019 - link
In Open Camera:AVC tops out at 25Mbps at 4K30 for some reason.
HEVC can be set to 80Mbps in the settings and results in a 62Mbps file at 4K30.
eastcoast_pete - Friday, April 19, 2019 - link
Thanks Andrei! Appreciate it! Any comments on how the 80 Mbps video looked like?I suggested to try this to a. learn what the phone hardware can support and b. hopefully motivate/shame Huawei (and others) with your results to improve their camera software. If Open Camera can go up to 80 Mbps in 4K HEVC recording, the phone is clearly capable of higher bitrates than Huawei uses. As someone interested in digital video, I always want to acquire at the highest bit rate possible, and then compress afterwards (thank you, Handbrake team!). Throwing out data is easy, re-creating details is hard or impossible. Also, higher bit rates generally reduce compression artifacts.
s.yu - Friday, April 19, 2019 - link
Hey Andrei, I've been looking at the 40MP shots of the P20P, 30P, and Mate20P, and a very peculiar thing I noticed is that both the P20P and 30P have false color interpolation artifacts, while the Mate20P avoids that; but in terms of chroma noise, Mate20P and P30P are on the same level, while in terms of texture aggregation, the P20P and Mate20P behave similarly.So the suppression of the interpolation artifacts doesn't seem to be due to chroma NR, nor is it in any way correlated to sharpening, *nor is it CFA-bound*, as the P20P shares a CFA with Mate20P while P30P uses RYYB. So do you have any idea why this might be?
I've been examining the area below the left half of the bridge for chroma noise and the pale-looking tree there exhibits a lot of interpolation artifacts in the P20P/30P shots:
https://images.anandtech.com/galleries/7027/P30Pro...
https://images.anandtech.com/galleries/7027/Mate20...
https://images.anandtech.com/galleries/7027/P20Pro...
Andrei Frumusanu - Friday, April 19, 2019 - link
I think all of it is just results of the lens; if you check the centre of other images they all look fine, but it gets worse and worse off-centre for the P20P and P30P.s.yu - Friday, April 19, 2019 - link
Hmmm, I couldn't think of an optical artifact with that kind of behavior...I don't think CA would be especially evident on foliage especially when the lighting of the scene renders it very low contrast. Basically in that really typical scene you're seeing blobs of other colors (which are not actually present) in a cloud of yellowish green.I chose another set and this time there's orange artifacts in the green bush in the center of the scene possibly with magenta artifacts in white or very faintly pink flowers slightly above it(the generally uniform color of the petals seem artificially "split" by the P30P between magenta and white, but I'm not really sure), again neither are visible on bayer or Mate20P.
https://images.anandtech.com/galleries/7025/P30Pro...
https://images.anandtech.com/galleries/7025/Mate20...
https://images.anandtech.com/galleries/7025/Pixel3...
It isn't so obvious in the P20P shot, but the severe texture aggregation rendered it impossible to tell. Usually for these artifacts to show, the pattern's frequency has to be high enough.
Andrei Frumusanu - Friday, April 19, 2019 - link
It's hard to separate sensor effects from post-processing effects. Another thing to take into account is that the P30P sends RYYB data directly to the ISP where things get recomputed. It can be either a DTI issues on the sensor, an ISP recombination issue, or simply a senseless noise reduction filter.neothe0ne - Thursday, April 18, 2019 - link
It looks like the speaker evaluation is missing from the review?Andrei Frumusanu - Thursday, April 18, 2019 - link
I'll be re-adding that soon / tomorrow, I wanted to add a part regarding stereo separation.In general the speaker is good, however it's still a mono bottom firing speaker.