Traditionally, Huawei P-series phones have pushed camera innovation. But after leveraging AI to help tune camera settings and putting three cameras on the back of its phones, what else was there left to improve? Sure, Huawei could have kept increasing the number of cameras on its phone like we’ve seen on the Nokia 9, but in some ways, that feels a bit too obvious. So instead, Huawei chose to completely re-engineer the way camera sensors work to achieve better low-light performance. Then Huawei tacked on an unprecedented 5x optical zoom lens just for kicks.
You see, inside almost every modern digital camera, there’s an image sensor with a Bayer filter, featuring a repeating four pixel grid that uses two green pixels, one red pixel, and one blue pixel to capture light and color. It’s a fundamental system employed by practically every camera company not named FujiFilm, but it’s not perfect. For the P30 Pro, Huawei changed up the formula by replacing the green color filters in a Bayer filter with yellow ones, with the reasoning being that yellow is a lighter color than green, which allows more light to pass through the filter and hit the sensor.
At 5x and 10x zoom, the P30 Pro delivered fantastically sharp images, though, as you get closer to 50x, it starts suffering from the issues inherent with digital enhancement. But the real eye-opener is how much more reach the P30 Pro’s telephoto cam offers compared to the 2x zoom you get on a Galaxy S10+. It’s quite a shock.
