Huawei has finally revealed that its latest flagship smartphone P50 Pro will be coming to Singapore soon. We managed to get a preview unit. And we immediately went around and take some photos with it.
Why? The biggest highlight of Huawei P series has always been its superb cameras. And the P50 Pro is no exception. You can see Huawei means business this time with P50 Pro’s double circular camera modules at its rear.
The double camera modules come with a rear quad-camera system consisting of a 50-megapixel (MP) primary wide-angle camera, a 40MP monochrome wide-angle camera, a 13MP ultra-wide-angle camera and a 64MP telephoto camera with 3.5x optical zoom.
If you are wondering why Huawei has included a monochrome camera, it is because monochrome camera can capture more details as it does not need to capture colour information. In this case, the monochrome camera also helps to sense depth in portrait mode.
In addition, the P50 Pro features Huawei’s new image processing engine XD Optics. It is essentially a set of computational photography algorithms said to “preserve the quality, sharpness and detail of images at the hardware level”. Well, you have to look at the pictures to judge for yourself.
To start, I took a photo of a bright sunny day view outside my window. As expected, the results are gorgeous with vivid blue sky and great details, such as the leaves on the trees, even in the shadow areas.
Seeing an amazing sunset during dusk, I tried the telephoto camera to see if it can do the beautiful sunset any justice. And again, the result is amazing as you can see from the below photo. It has rendered the scene just as my eyes saw it. Other smartphones tend to over-expose this scene.
The monochrome camera does not disappoint as well. As evident from the photo below, you can see the marks on the dark wall as well as the delicate details on the porcelain pot. I can already see the kind of street photography I can do with this monochrome camera.
How about low-light performance? Below is an image taken at night outside Star Vista using the Night mode. I found that the P50 Pro’s Night mode usually uses a shutter speed of a second. But as you can see from below, the result is quite magnificent. Colours are rendered vividly, while light sources are not overexposed.
We also took some 4K videos of a community cat at night. And below is a photo taken while filming this cute cat. It does look a tad pixelated compared to normal photos, but it is probably more than good enough for your social media post.
We will delve more into the cameras and other aspects of the P50 Pro, when we have more time with the smartphone. But for now, the superb photos taken by this smartphone have already wowed us. It easily beat the likes of P40 Pro and some of its competitors in the market right now.
Meanwhile, Huawei has also announced the P50 Pocket foldable smartphone. When folded, its compact size tucks into your side pocket easily. But when unfolded, a 6.9-inch 21:9 display welcomes you. This display supports a refresh rate of up to 120Hz as well as up to 1.07 billion colours and P3 wide colour gamut.
Local pricing and availability of Huawei P50 Pro and P50 Pocket will be announced later. But it is expected to be sometime next month.
