Huawei Mate 20 Pro review

27 October 2018
We love fall and it's not only for the beauty of nature's colorful cloak. It is also the season for all the big fat makers in the industry to pull the wraps off their latest smartphones. And what a blast these couple of weeks have been! And there is still plenty more to see before the month of Techtober is over but today we're focusing on the new Mate 20 series, which is bound to leave a mark on the industry.

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  • Shui8
  • KZ8
  • 01 Nov 2018

Nick Tagataka, 01 Nov 2018It's true that iPhone goes overboard with detail smoothenin... moreYup the only drawbacks in Huawei's image processing is their combination of Sharpening & Noise Reduction. They should just let the big sensor do the work.

Or maybe because of the other 2 sensor (telephoto & wide lens) are smaller than the main one, so they try to makes the image results looks identical between each other hence the image processing.

And the common answer are its a world of media sharing. Thats the strong reason why many companies likes to oversharpen, oversaturate, overprocessing images for marketing purposes. (I dont agree though).

However, the end results of Mate 20 pro are flagship grade, some parts even better than other competition, the flexibility & versatility of having 3 camera sensor that no other phones have, was astonishing.

    Shui8, 01 Nov 2018You just pick the weakness only from the Mate 20 pro camera... moreIt's true that iPhone goes overboard with detail smoothening in extreme low light, but most of the time it tries to keep the details as natural-looking as possible. I think he's talking about how Mate 20 Pro could've performed even better given its best hardware setup. It's got the largest sensor and probably optics which is just as good as the one on iPhone(and far better than Note 9's), and while it lacks OIS the sheer size of the sensor should be more than enough to fill the gap so it should theoretically perform the best... but its software processing is dragging it down quite a bit. I agree with you for other points you made though, colour accuracy and auto white balance of XS indeed leaves a lot to be desired.

      Shui8, 01 Nov 2018You just pick the weakness only from the Mate 20 pro camera... morei will just ad on that even PA writer was agreed that night photos are better than XS Max and Note 9...no need for long words as pictures say it all.

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        • Shui8
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        • 01 Nov 2018

        S Yu, 01 Nov 2018If that comparison proves anything it's that the Mate20P do... moreYou just pick the weakness only from the Mate 20 pro camera (which i agree), but ignore the weakness on XS and Note 9. Both XS & Note 9 tends to overblown the highlights unlike M20 pro, & if u zoom in on any sample from XS out there, its actually smoothen the pics & create like an oil painting. Note 9 now looks the most oversaturate photos as M20 pro Master AI 2.0 sticks to more natural colors now. As for oversharpening, yes sometimes its a bit strong on M20 pro, but at least they improving from last P20 pro. Apple always applied warm color tone pics, and I find that was not suppose to be. U supposely calibrate color temperature on screen/monitor, not on the picture results itself. Let say if my screen/monitor sets to warm color temp already, pics from XS thats already yellow will looks more yellowish.

        And last but not least, the 'sharpening image, please hold still' on Huawei phones was not Night Mod. Its a software tweaks that process the pics a bit longer than usual (maybe only for 1.5 seconds) is part of its Auto mod in certain situation. All 3 phones capture using Auto mod, so theres nothing wrong with that as it depends on how each company applied the picture processing things.

          S Yu, 01 Nov 2018It depends if the display's driver circuitry(the "tail" of ... moreHmm, really? Well, I'll lurk about that, thanks.

            Nick Tagataka, 01 Nov 2018I don't think that's the exact reason why Huawei held thems... moreBig hit did make missing color spectrum sensor on output though, you can see in comparisons how it is bad. I guess they made quite a mistake to remove it.

              S Yu, 01 Nov 2018If that comparison proves anything it's that the Mate20P do... moreUh, that's not really a night mode. PA specifically writes that it "asks you to hold the phone a bit longer at night so that it sharpens the photos". I get this warning when I take photos on my Mate 10 Pro in auto under low light conditions as well. Note 9 doesn't show you this type of warning, but when auto HDR kicks in it takes more than a second to show the image on the gallery preview on the bottom right corner so it's essentially the same as Mate 20 Pro. Besides, if it was actually a night mode, the details would've turned into a complete mess in these kinds of situations.

              But I mostly agree with you that Mate 20 Pro's camera could've benefitted a lot from more refined processing this time around. Now they are using great quality lens, what's stopping them from using more refined image processing algorithms?

                MadMel, 31 Oct 2018"mediocre" like this?... https://www.phonearena.com/news... moreWhile photos from all 3 are pretty great, I wouldn't say Mate 20 Pro holds any advantage over iPhone XS here. In most scenes iPhone XS has the finest details, and while Mate 20 Pro consistently creates the most eye-pleasing photo to many people (which is shown by overwhelming number of comments on the original article praising Mate 20 Pro's low light capability), I feel that Huawei could've done even better job in terms of pure image quality. Yes they toned down the sharpening from P20 Pro, but the noise reduction is still unnecessarily strong. P20 Pro's aggressive HDR processing was somewhat understandable because its lens quality wasn't that impressive which means they needed to mask it somehow, but since now they fixed it as well, it makes no sense for them to keep using the same algorithm instead of more natural, refined one.

                I saw a blog talking about how Mate 20 Pro can perform better in Pro mode with RAW mode toggled on(this disables most of the post processing applied to JPEG) and I was like holy crap it's far better than any output you can get from full auto, why couldn't they just go this way instead.

                  Nick Tagataka, 01 Nov 2018I don't think that's the exact reason why Huawei held thems... moreMay be right, but with its capabilities if it would not help, it would be probably just ignored. Still thinking about it too seriously is too much, they give points also for some modes and capabilities that got nothing to do with quality, while ignoring others. Not to mention points there change way more than if its basic quality .

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                    • 01 Nov 2018

                    Nick Tagataka, 01 Nov 2018Lol'ed at "Fake ISO", there's not such a thing dude. You ca... moreMultiframe *is* fake ISO in all practical meanings. If the exposure time is 1/2^9 that needed at ISO100, then it's ISO51200, if it's taken 8 of those images consecutively instead and merged them, then it's effectively ISO6400.
                    That said I don't know if their claim of ISO51200 is with multiframe NR or not.

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                      • S Yu
                      • vUt
                      • 01 Nov 2018

                      MadMel, 31 Oct 2018"mediocre" like this?... https://www.phonearena.com/news... moreIf that comparison proves anything it's that the Mate20P doesn't have a significant advantage in low light, arguably less than the P20P had over Note8 and definitely less than that over the X.
                      The XS has superior DR in many instances, I don't even need to go into specifics. From the dusk shot it's clear that the Mate20P still applies much more aggressive NR and results in more smearing and less detail retention, like the roof tiles on the London Bridge smeared into goo while they were still slightly visible in the comparison shots.
                      While there's a shadow advantage in the shot after that, there are also ugly sharpening halos everywhere whereas the competition shows very little to none, and from the notably worse highlight retention in that shot you can tell that the Mate20P exposed to the right anyway so there's a metering factor there.
                      In the statue shots there's slight amount of movement blur in most of the shots suggesting human error, but otherwise it shows Huawei's tendency of excessive NR and sharpening in stark contrast with the relatively natural rendition of the other two.
                      And finally, note that PA claims that the phone tells them to hold the camera for a few seconds, indicating activation of the multiframe stacking night mode. The XS also stacks 4 frames by default but it's ZSL i.e. instantaneous capture from shutter release while for the Mate you're asked to hold still and wait, and the Note9 only takes one exposure AFAIK, so it isn't an entirely fair comparison due to the difference in operation requirements.

                        vrvly, 29 Oct 2018Just seen those 40mp beauties in photo tool, no magenta cas... moreI don't think that's the exact reason why Huawei held themselves back from releasing DXO score... but it might be simply because they feared that the score will drop from P20 Pro. I can see that some samples from Mate 20 Pro have less details than those from P20 Pro, and apart from slightly improved dynamic range, nothing else hasn't really been changed when it comes to image quality. DxO ignores the performance from super wide angle lens, too.

                        Or, simply they are saving the highest DxO ranking for their next flagship, P30 Pro. If it actually manages to improve the camera performance from Mate 20 Pro as much as P20 Pro did from Mate 10 Pro, then it will certainly reign supreme and no one else will be able to touch its score during 2019(whether scores from DxO is really legit doesn't really matter here), and this will be a huge marketing advantage for Huawei next year.

                          Anonymous, 29 Oct 2018Huawei says it goes up ISO51200, P20 Pro has fake ISO. ... moreLol'ed at "Fake ISO", there's not such a thing dude. You can clearly see the s*** tons amount of processing happening in photos taken in ISO above 12800. In these cases the phone tries to remove as much noise as possible by applying crazy amount of NR but digital noise is still very visible. It's not completely unusable though, because it's also employing multi frame stacking to remove the noise even further, but it's still far, far from being noiseless. They are indeed pushing ISO to ridiculous level and it shows in the image.

                          "Even if you select GOOG LIGHTING session, the 40 MP is brutally defeated by Sony and Google"
                          I checked it and I can see 40MP output from Mate 20 Pro brutally defeating any other phones in the list. Of course, I'm talking about in good lighting, low light is a completely different story.

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                            • 01 Nov 2018

                            Nicolas F, 28 Oct 2018Emm.. maybe I don't know something, but how "subpixel rende... moreIt depends if the display's driver circuitry(the "tail" of the display, one of the main reasons bottom bezels couldn't be shrunken down for so many years) is compatible with subpixel rendering.

                              Kiyasuriin, 30 Oct 2018Yes. EVERY phone has. just not of the same quality. Some, L... moreA few corrections:
                              1. DAC means Digital to Analog Converter
                              2. ISP means Image Signal Processor

                                Kiyasuriin, 30 Oct 2018Yes. EVERY phone has. just not of the same quality. Some, L... moreYou are wrong. DAC means digital-to-analog converter. And when people ask if there is a DAC what they mean is whether there is a dedicated DAC chip. On most of the phones the SoC handles that conversion. 32/384 is what SoCs like the SD835 and the Kirin 980 can handle, but the quality of this conversion is nowhere near as having a dedicated audiophile grade DAC.

                                The quad DAC in the LG is a dedicated DAC chip outside of the snapdragon SoC and thus it provides superior sound. Of course, this DAC is still a far cry from the dedicated DACs that high-end portable music players have, but is a step in the right direction, although with the dropping of the headphone jack, there are DAC chips in the dongle adapters - of course, they are small and quite inferior in sound quality.

                                As far as the mate goes, I think they would have advertised it if there was one. I have the non-pro Mate 20 and the sound quality through my headphones is quite mediocre, so I doubt it. If there is a dedicated DAC inside, then it is not a particularly good one.

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                                  • sunnyp343
                                  • ije
                                  • 31 Oct 2018

                                  40W seriously? A bomb?

                                    Anonymous, 31 Oct 2018The low light performance is mediocre "mediocre" like this?...

                                    https://www.phonearena.com/news/Huawei-Mate-20-Pro-vs-iPhone-XS-Max-vs-Galaxy-Note-9-NIGHT-Camera-Comparison_id110049

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                                      • Anonymous
                                      • MFV
                                      • 31 Oct 2018

                                      The low light performance is mediocre

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                                        • Shui8
                                        • KZ8
                                        • 31 Oct 2018

                                        Kaloyan, 31 Oct 2018But it is a powerhouse, just one with average standby. 90 h... moreThanks for taking the time to read my comments, sir.

                                        Yes i do understand how your lab test work. But it doesnt work in a real life situation. Stand by time is average, very good in others, then the total up score wasnt convince enough of it battery endurance. People will be confused as on other places they heard the battery life are very good, especially people that coming from apple and samsung user.

                                        Sorry for the critics, as i find only the battery test from your site doesnt applied in real life situation. The rest of other things on the reviews, perfect. I'll support this website for a very long time now, just hopes u guys will keep improving.

                                        Peace!

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