Tecno Camon 19 Pro review

Spacious 6.8-inch LCD

In keeping with its pedigree, the Camon 19 Pro has a fairly large 6.8-inch display at its disposal. With a resolution of 1080 x 2460 pixels that works out to about 395 ppi - perfectly sharp both on paper and in person.

The particular panel Tecno uses is pretty average and fails to impress in any specific aspect. It managed a maximum brightness of 479 nits in our standardized testing, which is usable but far from ideal in sunlight.

The Camon 19 Pro lacks any "max auto" mode to get higher brightness. You are stuck with what is achievable by maxing out the brightness slider. On a more positive note, contrast isn't too bad for an LCD with low light bleed in blacks.

The Camon 19 Pro lacks any kind of color modes, settings or adjustments. You are stuck with a singular profile that seems to target the DCI-P3 color space and, to its credit, manages to be quite wide in its color reproduction. Color accuracy, however, is very low. Tecno tuned the panel to be noticeably cold with a pervasive blue tint. Reds are a little boosted, too, with just the green channel lacking a bit behind. It's not a bad look in person, but definitely far from accurate.

Expectedly, the Camon 19 Pro doesn't have any HDR support on its display. In fact, in software, it reports no HDR decoding capabilities at all.

On a more positive note, it is certified on the highest Widevine L1 level, which means it should theoretically get to stream content at HD and higher resolutions. That being said, we ran into trouble with Netflix on the phone. It is not available through any of the app stores on the phone, and after sideloading the APK, it only offered SD content and claimed the phone has Widevine L3.

HDR and Widevine DRM

That's not a huge shock, though, since Netflix has always operated with its own whitelists of devices. Hopefully, the situation changes eventually for the Camon 19 Pro.

High refresh rate handling

The Camon 19 Pro has a 120Hz refresh rate panel. Straight off the bat, we'd like to mention that this is far from a great LCD when it comes to pixel response time. In fact, the pixels are very sluggish, which produces noticeable blur and smearing while scrolling, particularly on finer things like text. The selected refresh rate does not seem to affect the response time. It's still usable, but just not what we've come to expect from a modern panel.

The Camon 19 Pro has a total of three refresh rate modes: 60Hz, 120Hz and "Auto-switch refresh rate". 60Hz is self-explanatory. It is just a fixed refresh rate mode. 120Hz works a bit differently, though. Using it, you get 120Hz in the entirety of the system UI.

System UI in 120Hz mode

Most of Techo's first-party apps run at 120Hz, too.

Tecno apps running in 120Hz mode

Third-party apps like those from Google are a bit of a mixed bag. Some run at 120Hz, others at 90Hz or even 60Hz. It varies on a per-app basis with no real rhyme or reason.

Third-party apps in 120Hz mode

As for the "Auto-switch refresh rate" mode, it's nothing too fancy. Tecno seemingly lacks any real dynamic refresh rate based on what is currently on screen. Instead, the auto mode simply relies on different conditions that determine the refresh rate to run an app at the start. Once again, the UI is pretty much locked at 120Hz.

UI in auto-refresh rate mode

But this time, many first-party apps drop down to a lower refresh rate.

Tecno apps running in auto-refresh rate mode

The same is true for third-party apps. The auto mode is more aggressive in lowering the refresh rate since that happens more frequently with many more apps.

Third-party apps running in auto-refresh rate mode

The Camon 19 Pro handles high refresh rate gaming like a champ, which is great to see. We tried a few titles in 120Hz mode, and all of them were happy to render at more than 60fps.

Gaming in 120Hz mode

Again, the auto mode proved too aggressive in its refresh rate, downgrading with half of the games we tried running at 60Hz. Hence, you should just stick to the 120Hz mode while playing a high refresh rate-capable game.

Gaming in auto-refresh rate mode

Overall, while Tecno's high refresh rate handling is on the simpler side, we are happy to report that it mostly works as expected and has the basics down. That's a lot more than can be said for many of its contemporary competitors. We just wish Tecno had opted for a slightly better overall panel on the Camon 19 Pro.

Battery life

The Camon 19 Pro has a big 5,000 mAh battery pack. The Helio G96 is also generally proven itself historically as an efficient chip. The synergy between the two facts is obvious in the Camon 19 Pro, which scored an excellent battery endurance of 121 hours.

Not only did the Camon 19 Pro do a great job with off-screen standby and call tests, but it also aced the on-screen ones. LCDs might be falling ever out of favor compared to OLEDs for a number of good reasons, but it's hard to argue with the consistency when it comes to endurance expectations. Regardless of whether you are watching a dark movie or browsing mostly white websites, you can expect your phone to last roughly the same as is the case with the Camon 19 Pro.

Our battery tests were automated thanks to SmartViser, using its viSerDevice app. The endurance rating denotes how long the battery charge will last you if you use the device for an hour of telephony, web browsing, and video playback daily. More details can be found here.

Video test carried out in 60Hz refresh rate mode. Web browsing test is done at the display's highest refresh rate whenever possible. Refer to the respective reviews for specifics. To adjust the endurance rating formula to match your own usage patterns, check out our all-time battery test results chart, where you can also find all phones we've tested.

Charging

The Camon 19 Pro is a relatively speedy charger with the bundled 33W adapter.

We never expected industry-leading speeds and are happy to see the Camon 19 Pro perform about on par and even slightly better than the last Camon Pro we reviewed, the Camon 17 Pro. Remember, the Premier tier devices from Tecno are generally of a higher tier and tend to charge faster.

30min charging test (from 0%)

Higher is better

• Xiaomi Redmi Note 11 Pro
  78%
• Xiaomi Redmi Note 11 Pro 5G
  74%
• Xiaomi Redmi Note 10
  65%
• Tecno Camon 18 Premier
  60%
• TECNO Camon 16 Premier
  59%
• Poco M4 Pro 5G
  54%
• Realme 9 Pro
  52%
• Xiaomi Redmi Note 11
  51%
• Poco M4 Pro
  51%
• Realme 9
  50%
• Samsung Galaxy M52 5G (25W)
  50%
• Xiaomi Redmi Note 10 Pro
  50%
• Tecno Camon 19 Pro
  47%
• Tecno Camon 17 Pro
  47%
• Samsung Galaxy A23
  32%
• Xiaomi Redmi Note 11 (65W PD)
  31%
• Samsung Galaxy M52 5G (15W)
  30%
• Samsung Galaxy A13
  27%
• Xiaomi Redmi 10
  26%
• Samsung Galaxy A32
  25%
• Samsung Galaxy A22
  23%
• Samsung Galaxy A03s
  15%

Time to full charge (from 0%)

Lower is better

• Xiaomi Redmi Note 11 Pro 5G
  0:45h
• Xiaomi Redmi Note 11 Pro
  0:48h
• Tecno Camon 18 Premier
  1:05h
• Poco M4 Pro 5G
  1:07h
• Poco M4 Pro
  1:10h
• Xiaomi Redmi Note 10
  1:13h
• Realme 9 Pro
  1:14h
• Realme 9
  1:16h
• Xiaomi Redmi Note 11
  1:18h
• Samsung Galaxy M52 5G (25W)
  1:19h
• Xiaomi Redmi Note 10 Pro
  1:21h
• TECNO Camon 16 Premier
  1:25h
• Tecno Camon 19 Pro
  1:28h
• Tecno Camon 17 Pro
  1:40h
• Xiaomi Redmi Note 11 (65W PD)
  1:42h
• Samsung Galaxy A23
  1:43h
• Samsung Galaxy M52 5G (15W)
  1:48h
• Xiaomi Redmi 10
  2:13h
• Samsung Galaxy A13
  2:18h
• Samsung Galaxy A32
  2:19h
• Samsung Galaxy A22
  2:20h
• Samsung Galaxy A03s
  3:38h

Thirty minutes on the charger got us from a completely dead device all the way up to 47%, and a full charge took just under an hour and a half. Not too shabby at all.

Speaker

The Camon 19 Pro has a single bottom-firing speaker. It's not spectacular in any way, but it gets the job done. It doesn't get too loud, scoring just an "Average" rating in our standardized testing. Frequency response is all over the place, but on a positive tone, voices come out pretty clean. Also, distortion isn't excessive even at high volume.

Use the Playback controls to listen to the phone sample recordings (best use headphones). We measure the average loudness of the speakers in LUFS. A lower absolute value means a louder sound. A look at the frequency response chart will tell you how far off the ideal "0db" flat line is the reproduction of the bass, treble, and mid frequencies. You can add more phones to compare how they differ. The scores and ratings are not comparable with our older loudspeaker test. Learn more about how we test here.