20 August 2019

Huawei’s P30 range: It’s all about the zoom

Submitted by: Frankie Cellucity
Huawei’s P30 range: It’s all about the zoom

There is no doubt that the P20 series launched last year from Huawei was a global success. Following on the Huawei Mate20 Pro was voted product of the year 2019. This phone takes ridiculous photos for a reasonable price. The Huawei P30 co-engineered with Leica is rewriting the rules of photography. Brighter, wider and closer. See the world from new perspectives. Discover the unseen surprises and turn them into your treasured memories. The HUAWEI P30 is pushing the envelope of smartphone photography.

That said The Huawei P30 offers you a best-in-class camera setup and a terrific design while commanding a smaller price than the Samsung Galaxy S10, or even the S10E. It's a fantastic deal.

The Huawei P30 has the same processor as the Huawei P30 Pro. The photos it takes are comparable to those taken by the P30 Pro. Unlike the P30 Pro, it has a headphone jack. If the smaller P30 has similar photographic clout and a slick design of its own, is there any reason to opt for the more expensive Pro?

But the P30 isn't just competing with the Pro. It's also got Samsung's new Galaxy S10E and S10 phones to worry about. Here it's a clearer choice: Do you care more about your phone's camera or your phone's performance? If the former, the P30 is for you.

That ultimately depends on your taste and how much cash you're willing to spend on a phone. The 6.1-inch P30 is palpably smaller than the 6.47-inch Pro, so large-handed people who prefer the phones like the iPhone Max will feel less comfortable here. (2,340x1,080-pixel, Full-HD displays.) The P30 also lacks the Pro's curved display, wireless charging and, in exchange for the headphone jack, true water resistance. (It's splash proof, not waterproof.)

The P30 Camera: Time to take flight

The P30 Pro takes the Mate 20 Pro’s rear-camera kit and adds a fourth, time-of-flight (ToF) camera below the flash.

Outstanding cameras have been Huawei's brand identity since 2016, when it partnered with German photography studio Leica to produce one of the first dual-camera phones in the P9 - that’s what the P stands for, after all. Three years later, the P30 Pro now has the tech world agog with its quad-camera setup. Don't count out the P30, though. While it "only" has three rear cameras (and no dedicated 5x optical periscope zoom lens), the day-to-day pictures you take on the tricamera P30 look almost identical to those taken on the P30 Pro.

That is to say, really freaking good.

The ToF camera uses infrared beams (and the time it takes them to return) to measure distance. Add that to the triple camera setup and you get the ability to adjust the depth of field of images after capturing them, along with variable or multi-layer bokeh photo effects (in other words, the bokeh of something near will look different to that of something far away, as it doesn’t with a DSLR, rather than the single treatment of bokeh mobile cameras usually serve up).

Like the Mate 20 Pro, the P30 Pro includes a 40MP primary camera, a 20MP ultra-wide, and an 8MP telephoto. The main camera uses Huawei’s new SuperSpectrum sensor - which the company says is physically larger than the sensors found in Apple or Samsung’s latest handsets - and it ‘sees’ RYYB (red, yellow, yellow, blue) light instead of the typical RGB (red, green, blue), enabling it to capture a wider range of colours for richly detailed images and, Huawei claims, making it particularly great in low-light conditions.

With the addition of a 32MP front-facing camera for unnecessarily high-quality selfies, it seems like the Huawei P30 has the best camera setup on the market (other than the P30 Pro, which offers a 50x zoom and an additional ‘time-of-flight’ depth-sensing camera for better bokeh shots).

And even if the P30 had the best photographic capabilities in the world, there’s a lot more to a phone than its camera – it delivers in terms of the other key features we expect from a flagship device, and overall performance. It has 6GB of RAM and an impressive Kirin 980 chipset, with a chunky battery providing plenty of juice. It has great specs and a beautiful design. The Huawei P30's larger sibling in the P30 Pro, has a few advantages over the P30 – it has that extra ‘time-of-flight’ depth-sensing camera for even better pictures, a larger display, and IP68 water and dust resistance; but it also costs more, so you’re going to have to consider if those features are worth the extra outlay.