Honor Launches The View20: A 48MP Camera Review
by Andrei Frumusanu on January 28, 2019 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Mobile
- Kirin 980
- Honor View20
System Performance
System performance of the Honor View20 shouldn’t bring any big surprises because it contains the same Kirin 980 chipset as we’ve reviewed in the Huawei Mate 20 and Mate 20 Pro. The chip performed excellently in those devices, and there isn’t any reason for the View20 to perform any different.
Honor employs the same kind of “Performance” mode in the View20 as we saw in the recent Huawei flagships. This performance mode is found in the battery settings of the device. The mode is a bit confusing for new users as it represents a new setting that previously wasn’t present on Huawei devices. Following our articles about Huawei/Honor cheating in benchmarks last year, the company had decided to implement this new “full intended performance” mode, while by default the phones would come in a more limited state.
The difference between the normal mode and the performance mode, as far as I have been able to tell, is the scheduler and DVFS ramping behaviour, as well as possibly thermal limits. The performance mode is in technical terms very much similar in behaviour and scaling speed as recent Qualcomm Snapdragon SoCs in competing devices, while the normal mode is a more conservative mode which is about twice as slow in its ramp up speed.
What I did note was new in the View20 is there’s actually a battery warning in performance mode. I’m not sure exactly why this was implemented as we’ll see in the battery life results page, it’s absolutely not something to worry about.
In general, I recommend performance conscious users to have performance mode turned on, while people who are less sensitive and do not notice the difference it might be worth to stay in normal mode and enjoy the slightly better battery efficiency.
In PCMark, the View20 performs within margins of error the same as the Mate 20’s – which again was to be expected.
In the web benchmarks, the View20 performs either equally well as the Mate 20’s, or in WebXPRT, actually slightly beats the Huawei flagships by a small amount.
Overall the performance of the View20 is very much at a flagship level and is at the very best of what you can get out of an Android device nowadays. Since our review of the Mate 20’s, we have been able to get preview performance figures of the new Snapdragon 855, and in terms of system performance, the Kirin 980 chipset devices are more than able to compete with Qualcomm’s new flagship. This means that for the rest of 2019, it looks like devices such as the Mate 20 and in this case the View20 will be among the top performing devices that you can get, which does bode extremely well for longevity of the phones.
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philehidiot - Wednesday, January 30, 2019 - link
You'd be amazed when you go back to old phones with older sensors. I found a dick pic from about 4 or 5 years ago and you'd be amazed at how grainy and small it looked with the optical distortion. Only goes to show how much effort they've put into the lenses and how things incrementally improve over time.That's if you see grey hair as an improvement, that is.
phoenix_rizzen - Saturday, February 2, 2019 - link
Would be nice to have more than 3x optical zoom, too.Will be interesting to see results from the OPPO? phone with motors and extra horizontal lenses too see how their 10x zoom results look.
phoenix_rizzen - Saturday, February 2, 2019 - link
motors == mirrorsStormyParis - Monday, January 28, 2019 - link
Very interesting and insightful, thank you.I'm wondering how all those fancy AI-, Night-, ... modes deal with moving objects since they all seem based on some kind of HDR.
Andrei Frumusanu - Monday, January 28, 2019 - link
They take up to 4 seconds to capture so they're no good with moving objects.eastcoast_pete - Monday, January 28, 2019 - link
@Andrei: Thanks for this review. Did I get it correct - the 40 MP are more virtual than actual? I am curious how the Sony "40 MP" sensor compares to the very large 40 MP sensor in the Nokia Pureview 808. That sensor was a beast, and didn't just have 40 actual Megapixels, but also on-chip 4-in-1 binning. Any comments? Whatever happened to that sensor?Lastly, for any manufacturer who might read this: As somebody who really looks for a good camera in my phones, I for one don't mind a notable hump for the camera if (IF) you make it worth it in the photo and video quality.
eastcoast_pete - Monday, January 28, 2019 - link
Okay, I think I answered my own question: yes, the Sony chip is a "virtual" 40 MP, but that comes at a cost, mainly in form of really small imaging pixel size. I also took another look at the 41 megapixel Pureview sensor that Nokia's 808 featured: pixel size: 1.4 µm; 7728x5368 actual (not virtual) pixels, and a sensor size of 10.67 × 8.00 mm. When it came out, it monstered pretty much any compact fixed lens camera with better details and overall picture quality. I would love to see something similar in a smartphone with modern tech (Snapdragon 855 or Kirin 980), Android 9+, and BSI instead of FSI. For that, I take the big hump any day. Anybody else who'd be interested in that kind of kit?serendip - Monday, January 28, 2019 - link
I still have an 808 that gets used on sunny days. That said, my cheap Xiaomi phones have much better overall photo quality with Google Camera's HDR. The 808 has lovely detail rendering, almost like a Micro 4/3 sensor, but dynamic range is lacking and noise is terrible.Now someone needs to take that big sensor and marry it with a fast GPU and IP. Microsoft tried this with the Lumia 1020 but the SoC in that was too slow. A new Snapdragon 855 should be perfect for this.
tuxRoller - Friday, February 1, 2019 - link
Here's a comparison with the lumiawww.androidauthority.com/huawei-mate-20-pro-vs-nokia-1020-924642/
jjj - Monday, January 28, 2019 - link
Would be nice if you could also camera review the Xiaomi Redmi Note 7, just to see the differences between this and a 150$ phone.