The Huawei P30 & P30 Pro Reviews: Photography Enhanced
by Andrei Frumusanu on April 18, 2019 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Mobile
- Smartphones
- Huawei
- P30
- P30 Pro
Video Recording
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.
P30 Pro: P30:
Camera Module Transitions (P30 Pro)
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.
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Andrei Frumusanu - Thursday, April 18, 2019 - link
The sensor should be in 4:1 binning mode, otherwise the dynamic range would be much worse.No 10-bit HDR or HDR recording.
4K30: 40Mbps AVC High@5.1 // 25Mbps HEVC High@L5
FHD60: 25Mbps AVC High@4.2 // 16Mbps HEVC Main@4.1
The bit-rates are quite low.
eastcoast_pete - Thursday, April 18, 2019 - link
Thanks Andrei! The low bit rates are unfortunate, and likely hurt the quality of the video. If you still have the P30 Pro, could you try the Android app "Open Camera" and see if that allows for higher bit rate recording?In general, I don't get why so many phone manufacturers are hamstringing even their flagships like that. At least give users the option of recording at higher bit rate. These days, even many affordable mainstream microSD cards support write speeds of 60 Mb/s and up.
Andrei Frumusanu - Friday, April 19, 2019 - link
In Open Camera:AVC tops out at 25Mbps at 4K30 for some reason.
HEVC can be set to 80Mbps in the settings and results in a 62Mbps file at 4K30.
eastcoast_pete - Friday, April 19, 2019 - link
Thanks Andrei! Appreciate it! Any comments on how the 80 Mbps video looked like?I suggested to try this to a. learn what the phone hardware can support and b. hopefully motivate/shame Huawei (and others) with your results to improve their camera software. If Open Camera can go up to 80 Mbps in 4K HEVC recording, the phone is clearly capable of higher bitrates than Huawei uses. As someone interested in digital video, I always want to acquire at the highest bit rate possible, and then compress afterwards (thank you, Handbrake team!). Throwing out data is easy, re-creating details is hard or impossible. Also, higher bit rates generally reduce compression artifacts.
s.yu - Friday, April 19, 2019 - link
Hey Andrei, I've been looking at the 40MP shots of the P20P, 30P, and Mate20P, and a very peculiar thing I noticed is that both the P20P and 30P have false color interpolation artifacts, while the Mate20P avoids that; but in terms of chroma noise, Mate20P and P30P are on the same level, while in terms of texture aggregation, the P20P and Mate20P behave similarly.So the suppression of the interpolation artifacts doesn't seem to be due to chroma NR, nor is it in any way correlated to sharpening, *nor is it CFA-bound*, as the P20P shares a CFA with Mate20P while P30P uses RYYB. So do you have any idea why this might be?
I've been examining the area below the left half of the bridge for chroma noise and the pale-looking tree there exhibits a lot of interpolation artifacts in the P20P/30P shots:
https://images.anandtech.com/galleries/7027/P30Pro...
https://images.anandtech.com/galleries/7027/Mate20...
https://images.anandtech.com/galleries/7027/P20Pro...
Andrei Frumusanu - Friday, April 19, 2019 - link
I think all of it is just results of the lens; if you check the centre of other images they all look fine, but it gets worse and worse off-centre for the P20P and P30P.s.yu - Friday, April 19, 2019 - link
Hmmm, I couldn't think of an optical artifact with that kind of behavior...I don't think CA would be especially evident on foliage especially when the lighting of the scene renders it very low contrast. Basically in that really typical scene you're seeing blobs of other colors (which are not actually present) in a cloud of yellowish green.I chose another set and this time there's orange artifacts in the green bush in the center of the scene possibly with magenta artifacts in white or very faintly pink flowers slightly above it(the generally uniform color of the petals seem artificially "split" by the P30P between magenta and white, but I'm not really sure), again neither are visible on bayer or Mate20P.
https://images.anandtech.com/galleries/7025/P30Pro...
https://images.anandtech.com/galleries/7025/Mate20...
https://images.anandtech.com/galleries/7025/Pixel3...
It isn't so obvious in the P20P shot, but the severe texture aggregation rendered it impossible to tell. Usually for these artifacts to show, the pattern's frequency has to be high enough.
Andrei Frumusanu - Friday, April 19, 2019 - link
It's hard to separate sensor effects from post-processing effects. Another thing to take into account is that the P30P sends RYYB data directly to the ISP where things get recomputed. It can be either a DTI issues on the sensor, an ISP recombination issue, or simply a senseless noise reduction filter.neothe0ne - Thursday, April 18, 2019 - link
It looks like the speaker evaluation is missing from the review?Andrei Frumusanu - Thursday, April 18, 2019 - link
I'll be re-adding that soon / tomorrow, I wanted to add a part regarding stereo separation.In general the speaker is good, however it's still a mono bottom firing speaker.