The Huawei P20 Pro's main selling point is its camera, or to be precise, its four cameras in total. At the front, there's a highly capable 24MP f/2.0 sensor for taking selfies, but it's around the back where the real excitement lives.
The Huawei P20 Pro is the first consumer smartphone to feature three rear-facing cameras, matching up a 40MP f/1.8 RGB sensor with a 20Mp f/1.6 monochrome sensor, alongside an 8MP f/2.4 3x optical zoom lens.
Before you get too excited, you're rarely going to be using all three at once and indeed that 40MP primary sensor is mostly going to see action by downsampling its captures to just 10MP. But then, it's been a long time since mobile photography was a pure numbers game anyway.
What's exciting here is how Huawei anticipates this since the Huawei P20 Pro is a camera that has appeal both for the keen amateur who just wants "better" pictures and pro shooters who know what they want and how to get it.
The heart of what makes the Huawei P20 Pro special is Huawei's camera app. The default "Photo" setting is for automatic shooting, using the Kirin 970's neural processing unit (NPU) to automatically detect a scene and apply what it thinks are the most favourable settings to it.
It's a trick that Huawei first debuted on the Huawei Mate 10 and slightly refined for the Huawei P20 Pro. You can detect food and get a push in colour vibrancy to make your Instagram food shots really stand out, or detect either cats or dogs and get greater clarity on their fur.
It doesn't always get the detection right first time and you can't apply other photography settings for it to detect, but that's a problem more for pro photographers. If your needs are more modest, you'll find it easily makes your shots more impressive:

The Huawei P20 Pro helpfully tells me that this is a cat.
Mind you, it thinks this is a dog, so further AI work is required.Move outside the photo mode and the fun can really commence. While much of what Huawei's done with the Huawei P20 Pro isn't new, given we've had options like portrait lighting in the iPhone X and slow-motion video in the Sony Xperia XZ Premium and Samsung Galaxy S9, the way it integrates and works inspires creativity.

The Huawei P20 Pro's light trails mode also remind me that it's not wise to hit 88mph on the open road.I test a lot of mobile phone cameras and honestly, it's sometimes a chore. The differences can be subtle. Some cameras are just downright dreadful and the apps can often stifle creativity.
The Huawei P20 Pro is the exact opposite of that because it's made photography fun for me again. The combination of lenses makes it easy to take impressive-looking snapshots if you're in a hurry, but it's when you start to play with the Pro mode that you can really unlock its potential.
Just as one example, the Huawei P20 Pro can push ISO up to 6400 in Pro mode and even further in full auto, up to 102400. Huawei's promise is that it'll unlock that in a future firmware upgrade for the true low-light shooters, which even means that there's potential for the Huawei P20 Pro's camera to get even better.
In the premium camera space, you should expect premium results. The reality for most daylight shooting is that any premium camera should deliver top-notch results. If the light is decent and you're not juggling the camera around like it's sitting on a paint mixer, good pictures can be assumed.
However, low light is where there's still plenty of space for improvement. To test that out, I took the Huawei P20 Pro out for a little low-light night shooting in my suburb, alongside the Apple iPhone X, Samsung Galaxy S9+ and the Google Pixel 2 XL. The Pixel 2 XL was running the Android P beta, but I had no noticeable issues with its camera software to report.
Here's a night shot taken with each camera in turn:




There are always elements of personal taste and choice when it comes to photography, but for me, it pretty quickly came down to the Huawei P20 Pro and Samsung's exceptional Galaxy S9+ for getting the best out of a low-light image. Taking matters to an illogical extreme, I headed for a local park to take some shots in near-darkness, just to see what each camera would do.




Again the Galaxy S9+ and Huawei P20 Pro stood out for detail, although you do need to be careful with the P20 Pro's night mode, which can sometimes overexpose subjects. You can opt to save in RAW for further post-processing enhancements if that's your style.
The Huawei P20 Pro is somewhat less expensive than the Galaxy S9+ and much more flexible in terms of photographic possibilities, given you can also shoot in full monochrome or use the optical lens combined with the 40MP RGB lens for up to 5x optical zoom any time you like. It'll also do portrait shots in a similar style to the iPhone X, although predictably if you use the stage lighting, it can get a little uneven for picking out edge detail. However, for regular portrait shots, it performs admirably:

Here are some more photo samples from the Huawei P20 Pro:
Huawei P20 Pro Sample Photos | | |
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