Apple and Samsung have been making such small advances in smartphone tech that consumers outside of Silicon Valley can’t figure out what they’re paying for. Domestic Senior Management, for example, a few weeks after swapping a failed iPhone 5S for an iPhone X said, “Tell me how this is supposed to be better than my old 5S.”
Everyone in the smartphone marketplace seems to have adopted the same formula. Start with a super thin package, which necessitates using a tiny sensor and a feeble battery. Make it sufficiently fragile that consumers need to wrap it in a beefy protective case. The result is a Galaxy S9 Plus that is only slightly better than an iPhone X.
From China, however, comes something interesting… the Huawei P20 Pro. From the DxOMark review:
At 1/1.78″, the main camera’s sensor is unusually large—approximately twice the size of the Samsung Galaxy S9’s 1/2.55″ chip [sensor size guide]. Despite a slightly slower f/1.8-aperture lens, the RGB main camera sensor of the P20 Pro captures approximately 20 percent more light than the smaller sensors used in most competing models. This sensor is also helped by the B&W sensor which also catches a lot of photons.
With an equivalent focal length of 80mm, the P20 Pro’s optically-stabilized tele-camera offers a significantly longer reach than the 2x tele-modules in the latest iPhone or Samsung Galaxy devices.
So it still a pretty tiny sensor, but substantially bigger than the competition (Apple has historically used puny 1/3″ sensors and then tried to fix everything in software, but it is tough to find authoritative information about the sensor size in the iPhone X).
The “telephoto” lens is actually a telephoto, equivalent to an 80mm perspective on a “full-frame” or 35mm camera. The iPhone X “telephoto” lens is actually a “normal” 52mm equivalent.
How thick and heavy did they have to go to get there? The phone supposedly weighs 180g, which includes a 4,000mAh battery, and is 7.8mm thick. The iPhone 8 Plus is 202g and 7.5mm thick with a 2700 mAh battery. The iPhone X is 174g and 7.7mm thick with roughly the same battery capacity as the 8 Plus (source). So… somehow Huawei managed to do this without going to the thick/heavy side!
DxOMark’s conclusions?
With a total photo score of 114, the Huawei P20 Pro is currently the highest-ranked smartphone for still image capture by quite a margin.
The Huawei P20 Pro is the best smartphone for zooming that we have tested to date, thanks to an intelligent mixture of digital zoom and the long reach of the 80mm equivalent tele-lens.
looking at the images and test results from the P20 Pro, it seems Huawei has skipped one or two generations. … The P20 Pro’s triple camera setup is the biggest innovation we have seen in mobile imaging for quite some time and is a real game changer.
Warts?
The Huawei P20 Pro achieves a Video score of 98 points, making it also the number one camera in our video rankings, albeit not by the same large margin as for still images.
The camera does not come with optical image stabilization and therefore has to rely on Huawei’s electronic video stabilization when shooting video.
Maybe the Chinese manufacturers will finally bring some diversity into the smartphone market?
Related:
I wonder how it compares with the RAW-capable Nokias like the Lumia 950 and the earlier Nokia 808 and 1020 phones?
The camera hasn’t been their marketing emphasis. Last year, it’s all been about shitty artificial intelligence assistants & of course the revolutionary screen notch.
Why are sensor sizes stated in the inverse? Why can’t you say that a .56″ (or better yet 14mm) sensor is bigger than a .39″ or 10mm sensor?
Another minor problem: you can’t buy it here.
That $1000 phone’s lenses are going to get scratched within a week, rendering the sensor quality moot.
Real innovation would be a bio-mechanical, self-cleaning, self-repairing cybernetic eye that runs on glucose.
I just got a Doogee S60, dual SIM 300g feels like a brick waterproof to 3m can literally toss it off a balcony onto pavement run over it with a light truck and shoot it with a pistol. Also has a nice camera lots of memory etc. There are indeed players on the margins exploring other directions in design space.
Barak: Thanks for that reference. https://www.techradar.com/reviews/doogee-s60 looks interesting. I wonder if it all falls apart quickly for Apple when people realize that it is dumb to pay $1,200 for a fragile phone, put it in a case, and then still have to pay another $150 per year in insurance because the result is not truly rugged. At 15.5mm it is almost exactly twice as thick as an iPhone or Samsung. I guess that is thicker than a regular phone with a case, but the battery capacity is more than 2X! It would be nice if they used the monster thickness to put in a real camera, but then it wouldn’t be rugged anymore.
A plus model with serious camera should be possible, I’d think, if they worked at it, perhaps by eating a bit into the crazy enormous battery or just sacked the front camera. Meantime I enjoy underwater snapshots and reading blogs in the shower.
The review you pointed to shows the deficiency of the media: random Russian YouTubers have more accurate ones where they actually test the phone. Eg, it stands up to a small pistol, it has two speakers but one is not connected, and the contactless credit card payment thing doesn’t actually work due to RF shielding by the phone’s body. The weight is less an issue than I’d anticipated because it’s no big deal if it slips out of your grasp and down the stairs.
When I was in Shenzhen a couple years ago, the locals referred to the “dodgy” phone market selling fakes and knock-offs. Funny to hear a manufacturer taking the appellation and running with it.