The Huawei P30 & P30 Pro Reviews: Photography Enhanced

Video recording on the new P30’s shouldn’t differ too much to what we saw on the Mate 20 Pro. The new Kirin 980 significantly improves upon the video recording capabilities of its predecessor, and as such, the new P30s should showcase significant uplifts to last year’s P20s. Particularly the P30 Pro will be interesting as it has OIS on the main camera module, which should result in much smoother video compared to what we’ve seen in recent Huawei flagships.

Oddly enough, while there is an improvement stabilisation, the difference between the P30 Pro and P30 are quite minor. Both phones video quality is in line with the Mate 20 Pro, which is to say good. However the colour rendition is towards the saturated side, and things do pop a lot more than they should.

The bit-rate for the video is also quite low: For 4K30 we're seeing a 40Mbps AVC High@5.1 stream or a 25Mbps HEVC High@L5 steam, far lower than what we're used from other devices. Huawei here probably is looking to save on storage when recording. 1080p60 video falls at 25Mbps AVC High@4.2 or 16Mbps HEVC Main@4.1, both again very low for 60fps content.

Recording on the wide angle module remains great experience, however it’s extremely shaky as apparently Huawei doesn’t use any EIS. In the past this was available in the settings menu of the camera, however on the P30’s this option is gone. I think this is something that the company will be able to re-add in a future firmware update.

The phones are able to use all three camera modules when in non 60fps modes. Recording at higher frame-rate disables the telephoto module. Transitions between the different modules still isn’t as smooth as what we see on the competition, and there’s a notable delay that is much longer than say on LG’s V40 or Samsung recent S10.

The video clip also showcases exactly just how far you have to zoom in on the P30 Pro to switch over to the telephoto modules; the quality between 3x-5x really suffers significantly due to the excessive digital zoom. For everyday scenarios however this is the region you’d want to frame in the most, so again I do not see the P30 Pro’s 5x telephoto module as an inherent advantage for the phone as it represents a massive double-edged sword, more-so for video recording than for still picture capture.