Tecno Pova 5 Pro review

A 50MP camera aided by a depth sensor

The Pova 5 Pro offers a no-nonsense camera setup, for the most part, that is. The primary 50MP f/1.6 camera is aided by a 0.8MP depth sensor, and that's pretty much it. We are surprised to see such big aperture, though. Unfortunately, we weren't able to identify the sensor, so we will just go with megapixel count here as the main spec.

The selfie on the front uses a 16MP f/2.0 camera with 1.0µm pixels.

Even though most competitors offer some sort of usable auxiliary camera, such as 8MP ultrawide or 2MP macro shooters, they don't appear to contribute to the overall camera experience that much. So we can't be mad at Tecno for not including them. The 50MP main camera here seems more than adequate on paper.

Camera app

There is nothing particularly special about the camera app. It's business as usual, with modes on one end of the UI and quick toggles on the other. One thing specific to the Pova 5 Pro is that it has high-resolution toggles for its main camera. The 50MP toggle is on the top of the viewfinder.

Camera modes and settings

It has a Pro mode, which is pretty standard as well. It offers exposure correction, shutter speed, ISO, white balance, autofocus and metering mode. Unfortunately, no RAW mode is available, nor is there anything else fancy like a histogram.

Daylight photos

Main camera

During the day, the main camera produces solid photos, leaving little to complain about. The stills look impressively sharp, with no detectable noise, wide dynamic range and plenty of detail all around. Colors also look natural. If we have to be nitpicky, we would like the exposure metering to be adjusted, as it tends to be slightly brighter and can leave some clipped highlights behind.

Main camera daylight samples

The dedicated 50MP mode, on the other hand, is quite noisy but offers a superior level of detail. You also get limited dynamic range, so keep that in mind when shooting high-contrast scenes.

50MP daylight samples

2x zoom

Unlike the 1x photos, the 2x zoom samples are largely unimpressive. It appears that Tecno tried to mitigate some of the bad effects of cropping with additional sharpening, but that has had a minimal impact. Photos are still somewhat soft, with little to no detail. Still, we believe the 2x zoom samples would be perfectly fine to the unpretentious eye for social media posting, as long as the lighting conditions are appropriate.

2x zoom daylight samples

Low-light photos

Main camera

For a budget smartphone, the low-light photos are more than decent. Even without resorting to the dedicated "Super Night mode", the stills turn out with a wide dynamic range, a fair amount of detail in the shadows and virtually no noise. If you look a bit closer, you will notice that the shadows are a bit too fuzzy, but that's probably the trade-off for not having noticeable grain in the darker areas of the image. Colors and contrast are also good, and overall performance seems consistent in this mode.

Main camera low-light samples

The dedicated Super Night mode improves the dynamic range, brightens up the shadows and adds quite a bit of sharpness. In fact, Tecno went a bit overboard with the sharpening, as some of the scenes look digitally rendered. The added sharpness, though, makes the details pop, but images remain a bit on the soft side. We still think the device produces pretty solid low-light stills. Our only serious complaint is about the Night mode's consistency. Many of the samples were blurry due to camera shake. So keep that in mind when you take the Tecno Pova 5 Pro for a spin at night.

Main camera Super Night mode samples

2x zoom

With or without Super Night mode, the 2x zoom mode at night is hard to recommend. The photos are blurry and lack detail. Once the algorithm sharpens things with Night mode, it turns the samples into oil paintings.

Low-light 2x zoom: Normal • Night mode

Here's how the primary camera on the Tecno Pova 5 Pro stacks against the rest of the competition in the controlled environment of our Photo Compare Tool.

Tecno Pova 5 Pro against the Redmi Note 12 and the Galaxy A14 5G in our Photo compare tool

Portraits

The handset performs well in Portrait mode as well. The samples look clean, with plenty of detail, natural colors (including tone) and a wide dynamic range. However, the spotty edge detection ruins it. The algorithm produces a rough background blur around the subject, even in not-so-demanding scenarios. And interestingly enough, the depth sensor doesn't work at all. Covering it with a finger doesn't really do anything, leading us to believe that the software doesn't use the depth sensor. It's all software.

Portrait samples: Portrait • Normal

Selfies

Aside from a few fuzzy selfies, which are mostly in sub-optimal lighting conditions, the selfies look excellent. The subject is always well-exposed, colors are nice and realistic, the detail is great, and sharpness is rather impressive.

Selfies

Video recording

Since the Dimensity 6080 chip caps at 2K video recording, Tecno decided to give you that unorthodox video resolution, which is 2560 x 1440px, to be exact. Stabilization isn't available at this resolution, but as you'd expect, the 1080p video is stabilized.

The 2160p video is pretty good, though. It offers superior quality to the 1080p - it has good amount of detail, it's sharp enough and dynamic range isn't too bad either. There's something off with the white balance, though, as the footage looks a bit warmer than you'd expect. Some of the trees look almost yellow instead of green.

The Full HD footage looks the same but not as sharp and detailed.

And here's how 2K looks without EIS.

The Full HD video with EIS looks rather smooth.

You can also take a look at our video compare tool to see how Tecno Pova 5 Pro stacks against the other phones we've reviewed.

Tecno Pova 5 Pro (1440p) against the Redmi Note 12 (1080p) and the Galaxy A14 5G (1080p) in our Video compare tool