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Huawei P30 Pro camera review
- londons_explore 7y agoGreat... Except you won't be able to buy one soon... And there won't be any updates.
- sschueller 7y agoOnly if you are in the US. For the rest of us the price will probably drop.
- BossingAround 7y agoYea but no updates for the rest of the world either. What you get with the phone is basically it, no more updates after that. Now that I think about it, the new phones won't probably have GApps in general, so no market store -> no apps (I'm sure there'll be a different market app, like Amazon or someone's, but let's get real, who wants that?)
- teknologist 7y agoIt'll be easy for them to ship UnGoogled Android because that's what Huawei (and other manufacturers) use on their phones in China. Demand, however, is another story...
- chvid 7y agoI would buy an ungoogled android phone - in particular with those specs and price to value ratio. If they are clever they make a version of the required services hosted in Europe and under European law. Many many people would buy that.
- divbyzer0 7y agoThis will find appeal among those that wish to minimise their interaction with Google. Having a smartphone (access internet, email etc) with camera is appealing, contributing to large surveillance corporations like Google, Facebook etc is not. This will be a tiny minority of potential users.
- bitL 7y ago...and don't mind unwanted interaction with Baidu or whoever installs non-removable services there.
- arihant 7y agoThis company is facing trouble worldwide because of their likely involvement with Chinese spying. I don’t think this will find any takers among people who are privacy conscious.
- divbyzer0 7y agoThose who are privacy conscious prefer to be spied upon by TLAs and surveillance corporations? To clarify I'm not in favour of one type or another, but it's unlikely China can have any influence over my life.
- thelittleone 7y agoWow I’ve been pondering exactly this. China has no influence over my life (yet) and I feel it’s more likely that my information could be used against me by the Five Eyes. Not now necessarily but who knows what the future holds for western politics, surveillance etc.
- DyslexicAtheist 7y agoif they give me something like F-droid or their own market place which endorses FOSS in a better way than what Android originally promised, e.g. minus the Google / Spyware shit preinstalled, then I'd pre-order one now. There is a window of opportunity and massive momentum for this provided they play their cards right (wouldn't hold my breath ... though ZTE on the other hand has been doing not too bad in contributing and supporting FOSS in the past).
- simion314 7y agoYou don't get that many updates on most Android phones anyway.
- NikkiA 7y agoThe last two chinese android phones I have had came with a chinese app store pre-installed anyway. Now, I didn't trust it enough to use it then, but with how google have been the last couple of years...
- odiroot 7y agoAs long as you can root it and put LineageOS on it we're good.
- jhasse 7y agoUnlikely as Huawei disabled Bootloader unlocking starting with the P30. See https://forum.xda-developers.com/huawei-p30-pro/help/huawei-start-allowing-bootloader-t3933062 https://forum.xda-developers.com/huawei-p30-pro/help/huawei-... for example.
- rickdeckard 7y agoWithout platform-level support from HiSilicon for the Kirin CPU you won't get that far with community-OS either. And as a wholly owned Huawei subsidiary, HiSilicon is also on that sanction list.
- londons_explore 7y agoI could imagine they might suddenly become way more open source friendly...
- phowat 7y agoThat's a very good point. If they start making lineageOS-friendly phones because of this whole deal, my next one might be a Huawei .
- londons_explore 7y agoExcept they can't buy half the components they need to make the hardware.
- mosselman 7y agoIt is crazy how much the quality of the camera's has changed. I haven't looked into DSLR camera's for a few years, since I have one and am not really in the market for one now, but have there been similar advances in that tech? As in, ground breaking higher quality, more compact form factors, etc? You'd imagine if you can get this type of quality from a phone's camera, you'd be able to make truly amazing things happen with dedicated camera's.
- threeseed 7y agoThere has but the pace is significantly slower. Fuji just announced the GFX100 which is a medium format camera in the same body as a Canon 1DS. And there are rumours they will allow for multi-capture i.e. 400MP image out of the 100MP sensor. But in the middle between something like that and your phone camera the market is surely going to decline.
- bitL 7y agoLow-light performance is now phenomenal due to better quantum efficiency as they are now using some older CPU manufacturing process tech, and small full-frame mirror-less cameras have almost perfect autofocus now.
- mosselman 7y agoThanks. I might look into replacing my Nikon D5000 at some point. Low-light photography is one of the only things that I sometimes wish it could do better.
- megaremote 7y agoThey are no longer R cameras. They have removed the mirror and gotten good results.
- alkonaut 7y agoThe leap in recent years isn't really in sensor tech so much as in phone manufacturers racing to get the best cameras by increasing the sensor size. E.g. the iPhone5/6 had an image sensor around 15sq mm, and the iPhone XS has a 25sq mm one. This one is over 40sq mm (1/1.7"). The nokia 1020 has a 2/3" sensor (same as the larger compact cameras) which is 58sq mm(!). So while there is are small incremental improvements in sensor tech (quantum efficiency, etc), the big development in quality is pure physics. The phones takes as good pictures as compact digitals, because they are now using the same size tech. Also the picture quality isn't just dependent on the sensor. Better processors can help with autofocus, noise reduction etc, and that obviously helps the end result. This however will lead to a problem with physics: you can't grow much beyond where it is now, without making the phone much thicker to accomodate a bigger lens, at least not without using exotic thech such as diffractive optics etc. So don't expect the massive gains in image quality over the next 3 years, as in the past 3.
- kkarakk 7y agoI wouldn't buy a Huawei phone, horrible service
- tlamponi 7y agoHow so?
- stevehiehn 7y agoWonder how the P30 mic is? I own the P20 and the thing I never noticed on any phone but completely hate on this phone is the mic. I'll go to concert and my girlfriend will take the same footage on her S8 and it sound great. The P20 totally melts down. Maybe a lack of dynamic gain? Not sure.
- atomical 7y agoHow is the mic for talking on the phone? I guess it might not matter since everyone is torturing everyone else with speaker phone and ear buds.
- stevehiehn 7y agoIt's fine for any low volume stuff like conversation. My guess is that it has a fixed mic gain that does not adjust for loud environments. Not sure though.
- cs702 7y ago> If you still needed a reason to spend money on a compact camera, it would have been for zoom reach, as even the best smartphone cameras could not provide usable zoom image quality beyond a 5x factor. This has now changed with the Huawei P30 Pro and its innovative zoom system that uses folded optics and a super-resolution algorithm, which finally makes usable 10x zoom on smartphones a reality. The zoom on its own will make the new Huawei an extremely tempting option for many mobile photographers, but the camera performs very well in almost all other areas as well. To enable up to 10x usable (!) zoom, this phone has three lenses, the longest of which is positioned vertically along the body of the phone, with a mirror reflecting light to a sensor that is positioned perpendicular to the screen, at the bottom of the phone: ___ / \ | / | | /<----- light | /| | | | | | | | | | | | | | ^ | | | | | | | lens focal length | | | | | | | v | | | | | | | | | | v | |=====| sensor \___/ The advantages of this phone's camera are rooted in physics, not software. -- EDITS: (1) adjusted the diagram to make it a bit nicer-looking; (2) replaced the word "optical" with "usable" in the second paragraph (in my mind, the two words have been interchangeable for describing zoom lenses, until very recently).
- MasterScrat 7y agoWow, I had no idea about this technology! A better look at how it's made: https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/14/18181853/oppo-phone-10x-optical-zoom-rumor-release-event-date https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/14/18181853/oppo-phone-10x-o...
- mrec 7y agoIgnorant question: at what point does the limiting factor for useful zoom become stabilization rather than optics? I looked briefly into ridiculous-zoom-level compacts a while back and consensus seemed to be that while the tech specs look good on paper you're just going to get a blurry mess unless you put it on a tripod, at which point you've lost the main advantage of a compact.
- baybal2 7y agoif done properly, software stabilisation can genuinely rival hardware
- dkobia 7y agoPolitics aside, I have Huawei phones and tablets and they're probably the best bang for your buck you'll get.
- rchaud 7y agoHuawei's higher-end tablets restored my faith in Android as an alternative to iOS. Nice deisgn, thin bezels, 2560 x 1600 screens (absent on all but the most expensive Samsung tablets) and most importantly, long-lasting battery life. I have the M3 8.4" tablet with those specs, and it's been running great. The 10.8" versions have pen support.
- rchaud 7y agoCan anyone suggest a point-and-shoot camera for taking pictures at concerts? I don't think the venues would allow DSLRs, but a small P&S would be OK. I'm thinking that would require good night-time photo capability and a certain level of optical zoom. The camera on my Galaxy S7 was great, but I upgraded to a Nokia X6 and the camera there is significantly worse (phone was $500 cheaper though). For my needs, I'd rather have a single high-quality dedicated compact camera, and not have it be tied to my phone, which I change every couple of years.
- dr_zoidberg 7y agoI have used the beautiful Olympus OMD E-10 Mk.III -- can't really say if it's going to be allowed in a concert[0], but it has a great advantage: it looks like a retro camera, and many people actually think it's an analog (ie, physical film) camera. I absolutely loved it's low light performance, though I've seen review compare it to the Sony A7 family and it'd seem those surpass it. Before getting it, I owned two compact Canons, the G12 and G16 and both were a joy to use: fast stabilized lenses, """large""" sensors (at least for a compact camera) and lots of integrated features. The newer lineup has sort of derailed and there are tons of very-similar-with-tiny-differences models, but you'd be looking at either the G1X Mk2 or the G7x Mk2 (those are the ones that look more like compacts rather than "pro" cameras). [0] since it's a mirrorless, so some would say a pro camera, hence not allowed without a permit.
- pentae 7y agoThe Sony Rx-100 mk V or mk VI will suit your needs perfectly. It’s pricy but generally considered to be the most camera you can pack into a compact. The VI has the only 35-200mm equivalent zoom on a compact which makes it perfect for sporting events and concerts that don’t allow ‘professional’ dSLR cameras.