How good is the Huawei P40 Pro’s camera?

The way I see it, Huawei’s P40 Pro (and, of course the P40 Pro+) have one standout feature that they absolutely must nail. One thing that they must do better above all else otherwise—at least, at this moment—I don’t really see a reason to pick any of the P40s over its competition. And that crucial feature, is its camera.

Which is why I’m a little bit underwhelmed right now, because I just got my hands on a bunch of photos captured with the Huawei P40 Pro by my colleague Hanif over at SoyaCincau BM, and they don’t look very good.

But, before we get to the photos, let me just put a quick disclaimer here: according to Huawei, the P40 Pro that we had access to was running pre-production software, so the camera performance is not final. With that in mind, I won’t pass any kind of final judgement yet on this device, so treat it as like an initial impressions.

OK, enough talk, it’s time to look at at the photos.

Low-light

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Zooming

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Daylight

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Selfie

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All of these were shot with Huawei’s AI on, and this was after we got the Golden Snap update over the air. Honestly, I was quite surprised with how the low-light photos turned out because the phone clearly had a problem with highlights. This is also shown in the smartphone’s daylight photos where it was unable to tame the bright sunlight.

This is surprising to me because the P30 Pro this smartphone succeeds does a much better job with all of these. It had one of the best night modes in my opinion until Apple surpassed it with the their new iPhones. Which is why I had so much hope for this P40 Pro to surpass that.

Of course, I will reiterate that Huawei tells us that this smartphone is on pre-production software so there is a chance that this will improve when it finally hits shelves. I guess I can believe that because if you look at the Selfie Portrait photo, there’s a huge patch of un-bokeh-ed grass.

In any case, it has made me really interested in seeing what the production Huawei P40 Pro has in store for us. Will it be the new king? I guess time will tell. In any case, I’d love to know what you think of this smartphone’s camera performance so far. Good? Bad? Avocado? Drop them in the comments below.

Photography by Hanif Azrai on the Huawei P40 Pro. Cover photo by Hanif Azrai on the Sony A7 III.

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