The Dual-Camera
The Dual-Camera
Now the most famous thing of Huawei P9; The dual-camera of the smartphone co-engineered with the German camera makers, Leica. There were also news about the relationship between the two companies that it was merely a branding and product certifications but later Huawei released a press statement denying the speculations and confirming that Leica has actually worked for the camera Huawei P9 is carrying. So here we have the dual-camera of Huawei P9 to try out and see what actually it got.
Well, the dual-camera is the most interesting thing on Huawei P9 that anyone would notice as how they are put together on the back of the phone. The Leica branding is, no-doubt, there to attract photography enthusiasts which may help Huawei in its sales too. If you didn’t know, Leica is one of the optics companies who make professional, premium and most expensive camera units.
Starting with the specifications, Huawei P9’s camera features two 12 megapixels sensors (reportedly the Sony IMX286) having 1.25µm pixel size – Mate 8 had a little smaller pixel size on 16MP sensor. It seems that it’s yet another custom image sensor designed for Huawei P9. Leica’s lenses are out there on top of the two sensors, with f/2.2 aperture with 27mm equivalent focal length.
One might think what good actually the two cameras do comparatively to the single one. First thing is that the two image sensors inside are not equal in P9. One of them is RGB/Color image sensor with a bayer filter which works like the most cameras. The other sensor on P9 is monochrome (black & white) with no bayer filter on top of it. The latter one has to work only with the amount of light as well as it gathers three times more of the light, the color sensor will gather. As well, the monochrome sensors also capture more detail as they really don’t care about the colors and have not to distinct them making it a faster process.
So when you take a picture with Huawei P9, it captures the same frame with both of the camera simultaneously and generate a single image after performing their software algorithms.
Secondly the Huawei P9 has a dedicated Depth ISP which according to Huawei, is twice as faster than software depth calculation. Huawei P9 also features “laser auto focus” for short range and “precise depth focusing” for long range.
When coming over at the camera operations, the native camera app has more than enough features to deal with. There are several modes to take still photos which also include the Leica’s special ones the standard, vivid and smooth. The monochrome mode is also there to take black and white photos which, in Huawei P9, uses only the monochrome sensor and takes the photo purely as it sees unlike other cameras which process the colored image to make a black and white one (aka desaturation). That way P9’s image sure would have great detail and contrast in its image and with the help of B&W sensor the low-light performance would be far better than usual.
Several modes are available to play with on Huawei P9 which, in addition to still photos and videos, are monochrome uses B&W sensor as explained above; Beauty mode simply processes a photo to smoothen skins, HDR mode, Night shot, Light painting, Time-lapse, Slow-mo, and Watermark. Settings bring a lot of options including resolution, film mode which provides Leica’s special options “Standard”, “Vivid colors”, “Smooth colors” and more.
Huawei P9 comes with a wide range of manual controls over the camera for enthusiasts and professionals who mostly prefer that way to take pictures. In manual controls, ISO ranges from 100 to 3200, shutter speed can be as slow as 30 seconds and as fast as 1/4000th of the second. -4 to +4 Exposure compensation values, Focus control with AF-S, AF-C and Manual. Huawei P9 even offers to handle white balance manually in Kelvin values from 2800K to 7000K which is pretty cool to see on a smartphone. However when in pro mode, you can also shoot in RAW format if you prefer to do post processing on a computer later. You can also find a wide range of different settings when in pro/manual mode.
Note: RAW format files are used to be bigger than the compressed JPEG files due to having image data in “uncompressed” or “loss-less compressed” form. Huawei P9 produces 22.5MB RAW image files in addition to a regular JPEG compressed file.
As mentioned above, Huawei P9 along with a laser auto works with the depth map to calculate distance between objects and focus precisely with the help of two sensors. The method also makes it possible for the algorithm to combine shots and simulate a high-quality optical blur on the out-of-focus field. As the technique still involves software to recreate the “aperture effect”, at various situations it manages to tell you that it’s not an original (SOOC) mostly when something in foreground is blurred out.
Aperture Effect: (background/foreground blur, or bokeh effect)
Read: See how to use aperture effect
Close up shots: (with and without aperture effect on)
Low light shots impressively have reduced noise as well as nice detail with proper color rendering when shot outdoors. Indoor results are also impressive in lowlight as well as in a little normal lighting conditions.
Outdoor Lowlight:
Indoor Lowlight & Good light:
I am not a very much fan of using flash with the camera in a smartphone. LED flash are very close to of no-use but when implemented well, it could do much better than most of the smartphone cameras. Remember those days when Nokia used to put Xenon flash in their smartphones but today there is no space in slim smartphone for that flash unit. Huawei P9, where did good with most of the elements in it camera, the dual-LED flash is also not that bad but due to very short range you almost get a washed out background when camera works according to requirements. Turning on flash, increase the shutter speed as well as decrease the ISO sensitivity hence the objects which don’t receive the flash light goes black in the picture.
Outdoor shots in a very good light are no wonder impressive if the lowlight performance didn’t go bad. Color rendering is better just like the actual scene, image detail is good, dynamic range has nothing to object about. Thanks to the monochrome sensor which actually seems to have great hand in such imaging results.
Front facing camera
There was a lot more in Huawei P9’s camera with its features and modes which I just couldn’t spend enough time with as it was a very short time that this dual-camera phone stayed with us as well as I couldn’t find some more appropriate locations to shoot at.
For the same reason, I couldn’t try video recording quality of the phone at all. However it’s worth mentioning that Huawei P9 only support up to 1080p video recording with maximum of 60fps. Slow-mo feature gives you 720p video at 120fps for maximum. We’ll try to get Huawei P9 once again to try out its camera in great detail.
