Honor Launches The View20: A 48MP Camera Review

Camera - Low Light Evaluation

Low-light testing on the View20 is interesting. Here on one hand we should see the advantages of the big sensor in its pixel-binning mode, but on the other hand this might be a regression compared to the bigger 1µm 40MP sensors of the Huawei counterparts. Much like the P20 Pro and Mate 20 Pro, the View20 lacks an OIS mechanism that not only represents a disadvantage in terms of video recording, but also low-light capture. Let’s see how the new Honor device ends up in terms of low-light capture.

[ Honor View20 ] - [ Mate 20 Pro ]
[ Mate 20 ] - [ Galaxy Note9 ] - [ Galaxy S9+ ] - [ LG V40 ]
[ OnePlus 6T ] - [ Pixel 3 ]

The first shot unfortunately does confirms some of my fears about the new sensor: Although at first glance the result is very similar to the Mate 20 Pro, under closer inspection the View20 does have overall worse details and less sharp edges than what the flagship counterpart can achieve. Unfortunately this is a simple matter of light capture ability on the part of the sensor, and here the View20 only achieves 64% of the per-pixel area compared to the Mate 20 Pro.

The View20’s strength remains its processing ability, which still allows it to achieve quite good results compared to the competition.

The 48MP clear mode in effect is again no better than the 12MP mode, both in detail and exposure. We’ll see this behaviour to be true of all the low-light shots, and in effect I would have wished Honor’s software would have just reverted to a 12MP shot instead of needlessly generating a 48MP file.

[ Honor View20 ] - [ Mate 20 Pro ]
[ Mate 20 ] - [ Galaxy Note9 ] - [ Galaxy S9+ ] - [ LG V40 ]
[ OnePlus 6T ] - [ Pixel 3 ]

The next shot the View20 also ends up strikingly similar to the Mate 20 Pro. The phone’s advantages over the classical competition here isn’t solely due to the sensor, but as demonstrated by the regular Mate 20, can be largely attributed by the image processing and ISP of the new Kirin SoC.

[ Honor View20 ] - [ Mate 20 Pro ]
[ Mate 20 ] - [ Galaxy Note9 ] - [ Galaxy S9+ ] - [ LG V40 ]
[ OnePlus 6T ] - [ Pixel 3 ]

In extreme low-light, the View20 seemed to have issues focusing correctly as all my 12MP shots ended up being blurry. The 48MP clear mode shots here better demonstrated the raw capture ability of the sensor, and it ends up with quite a good representation of the scene.

Switching over to the night mode, we get a significantly better result of the moonlit scene. In terms of pure light capture ability, the phone still lags behind Google’s Night Sight mode on the Pixel 3, even although this latter result is fantastically over-the-top in terms of how bright it managed to make this dark scene.

Overall, good low-light capture

Overall the View20’s low light capture ability is very similar to the Mate 20 Pro and more recent Huawei devices. This means that they’re quite top performers exceeding the ability of classical smartphone cameras which don’t employ new computational photography modes.