Leica Dual Camera - Features
Wide Aperture
You are most familiar to a photo with blur effect on the background while the subject remains sharp in focus. Huawei introduced the feature in Huawei P9 that allowed to simulate variable aperture effect. With other improvements, Huawei P10 brings some more into the feature having it renamed to “Wide Aperture”
The variable aperture allows you to simulate aperture between f/0.95 through f/16. However the resolution is fixed to 12MP, you can not change it. 2x Zoom is available here
Previously the feature allowed only to use blur effect in editing, now it adds filters which allow you to use different effect on the background and not just blur effect. Some of these are pencil sketch, comic, monochrome.
Portrait
Unfortunately, the feature still lacks the usability of PRO settings like before but another feature Portrait is added which uses the same aperture system to simulate artistic bokeh on the background while shooting a portrait. This feature comes with beautification to adjust the skin smoothness.
Monochrome
Even though the monochrome sensor is there to produce highly detailed color photos when combined with the RGB sensor data, It’s good that Huawei P10 provides real monochrome images as well using the sensor. It’s not that what usually smartphone cameras do to desaturate photos for black and white photos.
Interestingly, PRO features are completely available when shooting in Monochrome mode so that’s a good thing Huawei manages to keep all the features available in different modes as much possible. In fact, we can use Wide Aperture and Portrait features as well in Monochrome mode.
Panorama
Panorama function in any smartphone works pretty much the same way by panning the phone in a direction while the camera identifies the scene and captures every next photo, then stitch them together to produce a wider photograph. Difference comes in as how much wider the panorama can go through and what resolution the camera produces when photos taken in panoramic view.
Huawei P10 covers around 180° angle of view in panoramic mode which is not so competitive in its class. But the image detail is impressive at 100% crops as well as stitching errors are fairly low. The system manages to take care of moving subjects as well.
