Motorola Edge 20 Pro review

Triple camera with a 108MP main unit and a 5x periscope tele

The Edge 20 Pro one-ups the non-Pro in the camera department by bringing a 5x zoom periscope telephoto in place of the 3x conventional unit. That aside, it's the same setup, headlined by the 108MP main camera and featuring a 16MP ultrawide that doubles as a macro camera thanks to its autofocusing capability.

Just as we observed on the Edge 20, the Edge 20 Pro's primary camera uses the 108MP Samsung ISOCELL HM2 1/1.52" sensor - it has 0.7µm pixels, which it bins 9-in-1 for a resulting 2.1µm pixel size in a Nonapixel configuration. The lens has an equivalent focal length of 24mm and an f/1.9 aperture. No OIS, though.

The telephoto camera uses an 8MP OmniVision OV08A10 1/4.4" sensor with 1.0µm pixels - that's the same imager that we saw on the Edge 20. Only here, it's paired with a periscope telephoto lens that gives it an equivalent focal length of 126mm (or so it says on the phone's back) - roughly 5x zoom. The aperture is f/3.4 and the lens is stabilized.

The ultrawide camera is the same as on the Edge 20, and in turn, the original Moto Edge. OmniVision provides the sensor - an OV16A10 1/3.06" unit with 1.0µm pixels. The lens has an f/2.2 aperture and a 13mm or 17mm equivalent focal length (as per EXIF and the phone's back, respectively). Autofocus is available, facilitating this camera's use for closeups - ideally at about 4-8cm distance.

The selfie camera has a 32MP OmniVision OV32B 1/3" Quad Bayer (4-Cell in OV speak) sensor with 0.7µm pixels with 8MP images coming out by default. It sits behind a 28mm f/2.3 lens with fixed focus.

The Motorola camera app has seen its share of changes in the past, but the main way of navigating through the menus and camera modes remains the same. The camera modes are arranged in a customizable carousel formation, with the hamburger menu holding a ton of other shooting modes. There's also a Pro mode giving you almost full control over the camera's settings like white balance, ISO, autofocus, exposure and shutter speed for all three rear cameras.

Camera UI

Additional settings for each camera mode can be found by swiping up in the viewfinder or tapping on the tiny arrow icon. That's where you'll find an aspect selecor and self timer for photos and resolution and frame rate for video. The gear icon for the general settings menu gives you access to even more settings.

We noted how poorly the Edge 20 handles resolution for stills, a long-standing gripe we've had with Motorola's implementation. On the Edge 20 Pro, there's a setting for resolution which is permanently grayed out and if you tap on it it says that 'Resolution can't be changed in this mode', this mode being Photo mode, or any other mode. That's one solution, maybe. In any case, you'd be getting 12MP shots from all three cameras, unless you shoot in macro mode where the resulting images are 16MP.

You could sort of go around that by using Pro mode but that takes away part of the processing, and it's hardly something we'd recommend.

Daylight image quality

Daylight photos from the Motorola Edge 20 Pro are generally good, but somehow not quite €700 good, and that's without one single glaring flaw to point out. Detail is good and we're particularly liking the natural rendition of random textures. Having said that, there are occasional local areas of softness which we attribute to mishaps in the image stacking procedure - check out the area under the trees to the right of the second sample, or the trees just to the left off-center in the ninth (also the white car in the ninth).

Dynamic range, too, is good, but not as wide as what we've come to expect. This could very well be a conscious choice on Motorola's part to get contrastier images, but we'd take some better developed shadows. Again, not a dealbreaker in itself, but just a little off the mark. Colors are lively without pushing it overboard and there's no sign of the non-Pro's reddish inclinations.

Daylight samples, main camera (1x)

There's certainly not 108MP worth of detail in images shot at the nominal resolution of the sensor, though you could perhaps convince yourself there's a minuscule advantage if you view 12MP and 108MP shots side by side. We don't think shooting in 108MP is worth the extra file size and capture time, plus these are also darker than regular 12MP shots.

Daylight samples, main camera (1x), 108MP

The telephoto camera captures good 5x zoom shots with fine detail and little evidence of the 8MP-to-12MP upscale process. Colors are a bit more saturated and slightly warmer than on the the main camera. Similarly contrasty to the main camera's output, the zoom photos could benefit from some more gradual rolloff towards the tonal extremes, but it's nitpicking at this point. In the realm of mainstream 5x periscopes this one is hard to fault.

Daylight samples, telephoto camera (5x)

The ultrawide remains true to the main camera's global image properties and retains the high contrast and okay-ish dynamic range, as well as the color rendition. Per-pixel detail is good for an ultrawide, though we'd expect more crispiness from shots that started out at 16MP.

One feature that few others in the segment can boast, the autofocusing capability, means you can do classic ultrawide lens shots with the subject nearby and in focus and get that exaggerated perspective look.

Daylight samples, ultrawide camera (0.6x)

Macro

That AF is leveraged for close-up shooting, or Macro mode. It gets its own icon in the zoom selector and what it does is crop the middle of the frame of the ultraiwde camera to create the illusion that you're closer to your subject - the coverage matches that of the main camera. That cropped area of the 16MP sensor is then upscaled back to 16MP. Why not 12MP, like you get from the other cameras and modes? Because Motorola.

When looking at these pictures at 1:1, it's clear that they don't have the pixel-level sharpness of a native 16MP image, but they do look decently detailed. Colors are lively, dynamic range is good - overall, not a bad result.

Close-up samples

Low-light image quality

In low light, the main camera behaves very well in Photo mode and delivers well exposed images with good dynamic range, though an expected loss of shadow detail can be observed. Minor loss of saturation is also something we picked up on in darker scenes. Overall, detail is good and so is noise performance.

Low-light samples, main camera

We also encountered somewhat indecisive behavior in several scenes when it came to HDR - the phone would shoot the first image with HDR off and proceed to engage the HDR processing for the subsequent shots. We prefer the HDR ones, plus it's apparently the phone's preference too, once it makes up its mind. So the best advice we can come up with is to force HDR on for low-light photos, or just take multiple shots.

Low-light samples, main camera, HDR behavior: On • Off • On • Off • On • Off

Night mode, or Night Vision in Motorola's terms, spares you that guess work and brings the usual improvements, most notable in particularly dark scenes. Shadows get a boost, highlights are well contained and saturation gets a nudge too. The downside is that you get heavy sharpening combined with some loss of fine detail.

Low-light samples, main camera, Night mode

The periscope camera has a hard time at night and we observed more than a handful of shots with missed focus. Dynamic range at high ISOs isn't its strong suit either. We generally got soft underexposed images, though if you find a well lit building facade at night, you'd be likely to get a usable image. There's no Night Vision on this camera.

Low-light samples, telephoto camera (5x)

There's no Night Vision on the ultrawide either and that too doesn't particularly enjoy outings in the dark. Its autofocusing capability might actually be hurting it at night as tends to hunt for focus and very often misses. Even if it does get the focus right, it captures soft images with limited dynamic range.

Low-light samples, ultrawide camera

Once you're done with the real world samples, head over to our Photo compare tool to see how the Motorola Edge 20 Pro stacks up against the competition.

Motorola Edge 20 Pro against the Mi 11 and the OnePlus 9 in our Photo compare tool

Portrait mode

Portrait mode on the Edge 20 Pro uses the main camera so you need to be pretty close to your subject to frame a head-and-shoulders style portrait. The end results are pretty great - subject detection is excellent (though it does fail torture tests like the one with the lantern in sample 3), the default blur level is fairly conservative and very convincing, HDR is available and works well.

Portrait mode samples

Selfies

Selfies on the Moto are captured in 8MP by default. We'd go ahead and call them great - in broad daylight they have good detail, appealing colors and wide dynamic range.

Selfie samples, 8MP

There's also a 32MP mode, but as we've said time and time again, we don't see the point in 32MP selfies. In any case, these turned out better than out of the non-Pro - we got sharp images here a lot more often, and these do have more detail than the 8MP ones.

Selfie samples, 32MP

Portrait selfies are generally very good - the blur looks natural and separation is okay, though there was the occasional fuzzy cheek. HDR is available too.

Selfie samples, Portrait mode, 8MP

Video recording

The Edge 20 Pro records video in up to 8K resolution at 24fps with its main camera, as well as 4K at both 30fps and 60fps. Compare that to the non-Pro's 4K30 top recording mode. Additionally, the Pro supports electronic stabilization all the way up to 4K60, unlike the plain Edge 20 that can't stabilize beyond 1080p30.

The ultrawide and the telephoto are still capped at 1080p30.

You get to choose between the h.264 and the h.265 codecs, with the latter being the default setting. You might want to go in the menu and choose h.264 to avoid potential compatibility issues, even though we should be past that by now.

8K capture (104Mbps with h.264, 73Mbps with h.265) comes with a significant crop - the phone picks up the center 7,680x4,320px out of the 12,000x9,000px sensor, which works out to about 1.7x zoom. Quality is, in fact, okay - in relative terms. The video is ever so slightly less sharp than the 108MP photos, but it does resolve more detail than the 4K mode - keep in mind though, that thanks to the crop things are simply bigger. Dynamic range is excellent, colors are pleasingly lively, with no casts one way or another.

4K30 footage (50Mbps with h.264, 42Mbps with h.265) is good too. There's a bit more sharpening than we'd like, but the Moto is hardly the worst offender in this respect. There's still plenty of detail and little noise. Colors are a bit cooler than in 8K - not dramatically, but we like the other ones better. We are seeing more clipped highlights in 4K than in 8K, though dynamic range remains good.

The footage from the ultrawide camera (1080p, 20Mbps) leaves little to be desired - that is, little other than 4K. It's got good detail levels for the resolution, colors are pleasing, dynamic range is wide for an... ultrawide.

The telephoto camera (1080p, 20Mbps) puts out a similarly solid performance.

Stabilization isn't available in 8K, so you better have a way to support the phone when recording at its highest resolution.

It does, however, work superbly both on the main camera and the ultrawide, delivering smooth footage when walking, steady recording with the phone just pointed at a subject and issue-free panning.

The periscope tele does admirably as well, even if it's not quite as planted as the other two.

Here's a glimpse of how the Motorola Edge 20 Pro compares to rivals in our Video compare tool. Head over there for the complete picture.

Motorola Edge 20 Pro against the Mi 11 and the OnePlus 9 in our Video compare tool