40 million pixels & ISO 102400 ... Live action of the smartphone "HUAWEI P20 Pro" with triple lens

The HUAWEI P20 Pro is a new product announced at a press event held in Paris on March 27th. The “HUAWEI P9”, which collaborated with Leica for the first time in 2016, was released, and it is the third generation of the P series from there.

The display is equipped with a 6.1-inch OLED. Adopt a vertical display.

The three models announced this time are the HUAWEI P20, P20 Pro, and HUAWEI Mate RS, of which the P20 has a conventional dual camera, and the P20 Pro and Mate RS have a triple camera with three lenses. Mate RS is a collaboration model designed by Porsche Design.

Now, it's all about the P20 Pro. The triple camera is a camera system that combines three cameras: two cameras with RGB color sensors, a wide-angle lens with a 35mm equivalent of 27mm, a medium telephoto lens with an 80mm equivalent, and a camera with a monochrome sensor.

There are three lenses like this. From the top right, there are three types: tele, wide, and monochrome.

Originally, HUAWEI P9 and later are equipped with a mechanism that combines a color sensor and a monochrome sensor to generate an image by combining the information of the color sensor with the image of the monochrome sensor with high resolution and wide dynamic range. It achieved high-quality shooting that passed Leica's image quality evaluation.

This time, we have added a medium telephoto lens to this, enabling the pseudo "optical zoom" adopted by many smartphones of other companies. Combining both wide and tele with a monochrome sensor achieves both high image quality and convenience.

The lens is "VARIO-SUMMILUX-H 1:1.6-2.4/27-80 ASPH." Originally, the Huawei version (H) of Leica's lens brand was adopted from P9 onwards, but finally the name of the zoom lens "VARIO" was added.

The mechanism of dual cameras on smartphones should be focus switching and not optical zoom, but as far as this lens name is concerned, Leica probably recognized it as a "zoom lens".

In any case, while other companies often have lenses with a focal length twice that of the wide side, the P20 Pro has a focal length that is about three times longer, making it easier for me to use. became. If it's about 2x, you can get a little closer, but if it's 3x, it's easy to use when you can't get close.

You can also increase the focal length by 5x as a "hybrid zoom", but this seems to be a crop of the center cutout. The image quality is better than a simple digital zoom, but there seems to be some deterioration in image quality. However, if you touch the zoom button on the screen, you can switch between 1x, 3x, and 5x, making it easier to use.

The main camera on the wide side is equipped with a 40-megapixel 1/1.7-inch sensor with an 8-megapixel sensor on the tele side. Monochrome is a 20-megapixel sensor.

There are four types of resolution that can be selected in the settings: 40MP, 10MP, 7MP (1:1), and 7MP (18:9). Only the main camera can use 40MP, and the tele side has only 8 million pixels.

However, the default resolution is 10MP, or 10 million pixels. This would be the resolution in combination with a monochrome camera. In the case of 40MP, there is an impression that it is not combined with a monochrome camera.

This is because 40MP is inferior in terms of image quality. It would be effective when shooting a subject with many fine patterns on the screen under fine weather, but usually shooting at 10MP seems to be the best.