Motorola Edge 30 Neo review

No-nonsense camera setup

We must admit that it's refreshing to see a mid-range smartphone without useless macro and depth sensors and one that doesn't use the common 8MP ultrawide camera that desperately needs to be replaced with a different one.

The Motorola Edge 30 Neo has just two cameras on its back, both of which are usable. The main one uses a 64MP, 1/1.97", 0.7µm sensor and f/1.8, optically stabilized lens. The second one is a 13MP, f/2.2, 1.12µm camera with autofocus. The advertised field of view is 120 degrees.

The front holds a 32MP, f/2.4, 0.7µm camera that outputs 8MP binned photos.

Camera menus

The handset uses version 9 of Motorola's Moto Camera app, which is distributed and updated through Google Play. There are some small changes to the UI compared to the previous Moto devices we've reviewed but the general concept remains. Swiping left and right switches between camera modes while the additional ones are located in the "More" sub-menu on the far-right of the carousel.

Additional settings for each Photo or Video mode are accessed by a swipe down from the top of the viewfinder.

Camera menus

There's no 2x zoom toggle probably, you only get ultrawide, 1x and macro toggles on the viewfinder. Something tells us that even Motorola doesn't want you to zoom on your photos.

We are happy to report that Motorola has finally fixed the interpolation behavior and now the main and the ultrawide cameras shoot in their native resolutions. No needless upscaling this time around. We also like the dedicated toggle for the Macro camera. It finally gets a spot on the viewfinder in the default Photo mode.

Daylight samples

Main camera

During the day, the main camera delivers good photos with a wide dynamic range, great sharpness and plenty of fine detail. The foliage looks good, colors are punchy and there's hardly any noise. The overall photo quality is clearly up there with the Samsung Galaxy A53, which is one of the competitors in the price range.

16MP daylight samples

The primary camera performance is very consistent both outdoors and indoors. Noise is a bit more visible indoors across surfaces of uniform color but you'd really have to pixel peep to notice it.

16MP daylight samples

The 64MP mode is hard to recommend as noise, general softness and weird artifacts plague the photos. Dynamic range is worse too so the extra detail you'd get just isn't worth it.

64MP daylight samples

Ultrawide camera

The ultrawide's quality is definitely above average as most phones in this price bracket rely on 8MP sensors and we get 13MP here. Of course, not everything boils down to the sensor resolution. The quality lens is important as well. The Galaxy A53 uses a 12MP ultrawide, for instance, but it produces much softer images for some reason but we suspect its lens is to blame. But we digress.

The ultrawide photos we took with the Motorola Edge 30 Neo have contrast on point, good color saturation, and very good fine detail for this sort of camera. The otherwise above-average sharpness was only compromised around the corners, where we could also see some purple fringing. These photos also have a more limited dynamic range than the main camera's resulting in crushed shadows here and there.

Daylight ultrawide samples

Overall, we are quite happy with the ultrawide camera's performance. The added bonus of having autofocus is a perk you shouldn't overlook. That's usually a feature reserved only for high-end phones. In fact, even big dogs like Samsung miss to include that in some of its flagships. The AF allows for dramatic close-up shots too.

Daylight ultrawide samples

Speaking of autofocus, it allows the camera to shoot macro photos and you can get a crisp focus on a subject 2-4 cm away. The results aren't amazing but they are way better than what we've seen from competing dedicated 2MP macro camera solutions.

Macro samples

Low-light samples

Main camera

The main camera's nighttime performance is quite decent - the photos come out well-exposed and with good color saturation. Thanks to HDR, highlights are well preserved too. Zooming in however reveals there is not much fine detail and shadows are often quite dark.

The Galaxy A53 does a better job with these photos with a sharper detail rendition, less noise and brighter shadows.

Low-light main camera samples

The Motorola Edge 30 Neo's Night mode is not very competent. Stacking frames took a bit too long every time and the results left us with mixed impressions. We certainly saw the noise reduced, the shadows considerably brightened and better detail rendition overall. However, these photos have a weird color reproduction, which looked unnatural and even a bit washed out. So in the end, we preferred the photos produced by the standard Photo mode.

Night mode main camera samples

Ultrawide camera

While the ultrawide does a pretty decent job during the day, it struggles to deliver usable photos at night. The images are quite colorful and have nice exposure but only as long as you view them on the phone’s screen. Any sort of magnification reveals they are in fact really soft and fine detail is smeared beyond recognition. There's no Night mode available for the ultrawide camera either.

The Samsung Galaxy A53 does a better job here with its ultrawide photos, producing sharper images with brighter shadows. It really left us wondering why its ultrawide has such a poor performance during the day.

Low-light ultrawide samples<

And here are photos of our usual posters taken with the Motorola Edge 30 Neo. You can see how it stacks up against the competition.

Motorola Edge 30 Neo agaianst the Samsung Galaxy A53 and the OnePlus Nord 2T in our Photo compare tool

Portraits

The portrait shots are pretty good if the right lighting conditions are met. Under good sunlight, the photos have plenty of detail, color and display excellent sharpness. The latter seems to suffer the most indoors. The natural skin tone is preserved throughout all lighting conditions and the HDR keeps the subject's face always well exposed too.

Portraits

The bokeh effect is quite convincing as the edge detection is doing a pretty good job of separating the subject from the foreground and background and can only be fooled by unruly hair.

The only issue we had was the process of taking a portrait photo - the software was not very reliable in detecting a person in the scene and often complained that our subject was too far away while the opposite was true.

Selfies

The selfies are colorful, with decent dynamic range and sharpness but noise can often be spotted on homogeneous backgrounds. There's not much fine detail and the subject's skin can often appear pale, especially if there's a strong light source nearby. The bokeh effect isn't amazing and can sometimes blur the edges around the subject.

Selfies: Normal • Portrait

Video recording

The smartphone caps at 1080p@60fps with EIS video recording, even when using its main camera. That's due to hardware limitations as the Snapdragon 695 chipset lacks a 4K-capable ISP. Sadly, that's a big omission as most of the Edge 30 Neo's competitors are capable of 2160p recording.

Let's begin with the 1080p@30fps video recorded by the primary cam. The videos are colorful and contrasty but the dynamic range is not at its best with some clipped shadows and highlights.

The ultrawide camera can also do 1080p@30fps videos and it produces about the same level of video quality with nice and punchy colors and a decent level of sharpness. The contrast is even higher here, which hurts the dynamic range a bit more but these videos are still good coming from an ultrawide cam.

Finally, here is the Motorola Edge 30 Neo in our video tool so you can make your own comparisons.

2160p: Motorola Edge 30 Neo (1080p) against the Galaxy A53 and the OnePlus Nord 2T in our Video compare tool