Huawei P50 Pro review

Selfies

The selfie camera is quite a unique piece of tech. It uses a 13MP sensor with unusually large 1.22µm pixels and an unusually wide-angle 18mm f/2.4 lens. It also supports PDAF, a feature that's still rare among the selfie cameras, to begin with.

Huawei offers three view or crop modes for the selfies - W, 0.8X and 1X - and these correspond to focal lengths of 18mm, 21mm, and 27mm (in 35mm equivalent). Those are achieved by digital zoom plus some AI-enhanced multi-stacking.

The default (18mm) selfies are one of the best selfies we've encountered to date. They are incredibly sharp and detailed, with Huawei's signature balanced look, accurate colors, superb colors and great dynamic range in most cases.

Selfies (18mm), 13MP

We don't know how Huawei did it, but we cannot tell the 0.8x selfies (21mm) are digitally zoomed. In fact, they look as sharp as the default pictures and excel in everything in just the same way.

Selfies (21mm), 13MP

Finally, the 1x (27mm) selfies are also fantastic, though here we can notice a minor drop in the sharpness. But it's so small that we can consider them just as good as the rest of the bunch.

Selfies (27mm), 13MP

There is Portrait mode for selfies, but it doesn't appear to be offering simulated blur. Instead, it has various Lighting effects (including all-black background) and beautifications.

A selfie portrait

Video recording

The Huawei P50 Pro records video up to 4K at 60fps with the primary, the monochrome and telephoto cameras, and up to 4K at 30fps with the ultrawide and the selfie cameras.

Optical stabilization is available on the primary and zoom cameras, while always-on electronic stabilization is present across all five shooters. You cannot turn the EIS off.

The Huawei P50 Pro supports time-lapse, 240fps slow-mo, dual-video with two cameras at once, and in the Manual video mode, you can shoot at ISO 51,200 for super low-light quality. You can use directional audio zoom when zooming in or out when capturing a video.

The 4K30 footage has a video bitrate of 39-40Mbps. Audio is always captured stereo with 96kbps bitrate, but don't let the low number fool you - the sound is usually clean of wind and other disruptions, rich and deep.

The main camera records pretty good 4K videos with enough detail and once again - a nicely balanced look. Their contrast is high, the colors are accurate, and the dynamic range is usually slightly better than the average. The videos could have benefited from a little bit more sharpness, but we suppose the always-in electronic stabilization is to blame for that.

The 4K clips captured on the ultrawide camera are good, too. They also have enough detail, and the colors are accurate though they can use a contrast boost. The dynamic range can be tweaked a bit, too. Still, even as is - those are solid ultrawide videos.

The telephoto camera has two zoom levels when capturing videos - 4x and 10x. The 4x videos are excellent - with more than enough detail, good sharpness, realistic colors, commendable contrast and high dynamic range.

The 10x zoomed videos are soft and with poor detail when zoomed, otherwise they show good contrast and accurate colors. If you don't look them up closely or if they are shot at 1080p resolution, they will turn up usable.

The footage from the monochrome camera is outstanding - detailed, with superb contrast and dynamic range. The EIS once again took a small chunk of the sharpness, but the natural look is here, and we liked what we saw.

The low-light videos from the main camera are good - they are more detailed than we expected, with realistic exposure and very good color saturation. The noise is impressively low.

The ultrawide camera captured barely usable videos at night as those appear to be quite noisy and dark. We can still see what's going on, and color saturation is good. We suggest using the camera only in extreme cases.

The 4x zoomed videos are quite nice even if a bit dark - there is a lot of detail, the colors are great, and while noise is present - it doesn't get in the way. This camera delivers good videos at night and you can expect more than satisfying clips.

The 10x zoomed videos are digitally zoomed, and while soft, they do have tolerable noise accurate colors, and you can see what's happening. They look really well on the phone's screen, too.

Finally, the monochrome low-light videos are uninspiring. While there is enough detail, the picture is noisy, and the dynamic range is low with plenty of blown highlights. We expected more from this camera at night.

Finally, here is the Huawei P50 Pro in our video comparison database.

2160p: Huawei P50 Pro against the Xiaomi Mi 11 Ultra and the Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra 5G in our Video compare tool