Leica Dual Camera - Image Quality & Performance
Camera Performance
The hardware within Huawei P10 is sure making things easy for the camera to perform really well. The octa-core Kirin 960 has already shown its overall performance along with the support of 4GB RAM. That seems to help camera as well as cold start of the camera is faster and improved that takes less than a second.
Additionally, the autofocus is impressively fast in almost all lighting conditions. Huawei P10 mostly did well even in low-light conditions with locking onto subjects instantly. Throughout our tests, we didn’t get a single shot that is out of focus – excluding some unexpected clicks.
But the battery is somewhat that’s not friendly to the camera. If you are a camera guy, and usually keep your smartphone in your hands while walking around, you are supposed to have extra battery pack or power bank to get the Huawei P10 recharged. Another thing we noticed, that P10 gets warm when using camera and that’s even badly warm when out in bright sunlight.
Image Quality – Daylight Outdoor
Let it be short, we are impressed with the shots in good light. Under bright or good enough light outdoors, using low ISO speeds, Huawei P10 captures nice exposures with vivid colors which are not unnatural to look at. Dynamic range is really good too which probably didn’t make me feel to turn on HDR in many cases. The dual-camera takes care of the white balance in almost all situations.
After examining the shots, we can tell they are nicely sharp across the frame. As told, in good light we are impressed, Huawei P10 is managing noise in excellent way, the images are very good in detail with almost no artifacts around the edges. But that makes some low-contrast shadowed distant objects mixed up in detail – probably due to noise reduction. Even though some luminance noise is noticeable in some areas, overall performance of Huawei P10 in bright light is undoubtedly top notch.
Image Quality – Lowlight
Huawei P10’s camera is good enough to capture nice color, white balance and exposure, throughout the ISO range. Due to higher ISO levels noise becomes more visible as well as the side effects of noise reduction but P10 manages to balance between retaining image detail and noise reduction.
As told above, the camera goes down to 1/17th sec shutter speed in auto settings as well as when you manually control ISO. Due to camera-shake issues, the camera restricts auto settings at 1/17th sec. But if you want you can manually take down the shutter speed to 30 seconds. However the OIS performs good with the restricted shutter speed level.
With everything that could effect the camera performance in low-light, P10 manages to deliver excellent results at its best.
Here are some night shots with auto and manual control overrides. A photo with white horses was taken twice – ISO 400 and ISO 200 in those two photos can easily be differentiated with their exposure and noise levels. Overall these shots were visually appealing and Huawei P10 delivered pretty awesome output. Two long exposures were taken with “Night Shot” mode of the camera.
Image Quality – Flash
While using the flash with a smartphone camera is something I hardly found useful to take some good low light shot. As long as the flash doesn’t destroy the natural colors and skin tones of the subject, it’s better to use it. The one in Huawei P10 has enough power to lighten up the whole subject and a little around it while keeping the ISO levels low. The flash is well under control to avoid highlight clipping.
Front Camera
Huawei P10 features 8 megapixels camera but has a wider f/1.9 aperture lens. Screen flash is improved to maintain skin tones. The camera supports an widening frame feature – that occurs automatically when the camera detects more faces in the frame. This thing mostly gives an impression of an intelligent camera.
Previously, wide aperture mode wasn’t available with front camera – well it’s still not available exactly, but the similar Portrait mode can be used with the front camera. Front cameras are usually just a quick sharing tool of your selfies or a video calling, the one in Huawei P10 produces some better images.
