Huawei Mate 10 Pro Camera Review

11) Summary

While testing out the Huawei Mate 10 Pro, I thoroughly enjoyed using it as a smartphone. Thanks to its excellent overall performance, plenty of RAM and storage, along with a large OLED screen and nice stereo speakers, it was a pleasure to use it for watching content, listening to music and browsing the Internet. The biggest advantage of this phone compared to others though, was its amazing battery life – it just kept going and going! After using this phone, I started to wonder why all smartphone manufacturers can’t safely beef up their batteries in a similar way, so that we don’t have to constantly worry about recharging.

When it comes to camera features though (which is what this review is all about), the Huawei Mate 10 Pro was a disappointment. While it mostly does a good job with capturing standard images, anything custom-built that Huawei threw into the phone app, was more or less a failure. As I have shown on the previous page, I did not like what the phone did when using such features as “Wide Aperture” and “Portrait Mode”, with the camera messing up background blur and resulting in weird skin tones. I found the dual camera setup to be pretty useless, since both cameras have the same focal length and aperture, except the first one is Monochrome-only. Not sure who would see value in an in-camera black and white conversion, but as a photographer, I have much more leverage over the resulting B&W image if I shoot in color. Some images ended up having weird grid artifacts and there were a few other issues that I did not appreciate.

However, what really did it for me was the poor autofocus. With Huawei praising the phone’s phase detect, contrast detect and laser autofocus, I really thought this camera would shine in terms of AF speed and accuracy. While it definitely shines with fast focusing, the accuracy is where the problem lies. The camera just failed to focus at close subjects and even when shooting at infinity, I found way too many images that were just slightly out of focus, making them unusable. To me, this is something Huawei should have thoroughly tested before releasing and it is the primary reason why I personally would not recommend our readers to buy this phone. That’s unfortunate, because it could have been a phenomenal smartphone if Huawei put more emphasis on ironing out all the bugs and issues…