I've already put the Huawei P30 Pro through its low light paces in a dedicated shootout against the iPhone XS Max, Samsung Galaxy S10+, Huawei Mate 20 Pro and Google Pixel 3, which you can read in full here.
The best comparison in that piece has to be its low light park test. This uses a local sporting ground I've used extensively to test out the low light capabilities of smartphones in the past. It's far from the most exciting composition choice, but the general lack of light makes it a notably brutal test, and one that some phones really struggle with.
The iPhone XS Max isn't a great performer here, although it's fairly indicative of what I could actually see.
The Pixel 3 without Night Sight can see even less. It's effectively blind.
In Night Sight mode it does much better, albeit with some slightly oversaturated colour choices.
The Galaxy S10+ grabs as much light as it can, and quite quickly given it's a fast, AI-enabled shot. It's not entirely clear though.
The Mate 20 in regular shooting mode does a decent job with picking up what light it can.
But throwing it into Night mode gives it more scope to pick up finer detail.
However, this is a clear win for the Huawei P30 Pro, which is in a class of its own, even without engaging Night mode.
The light and detail in this shot are simply amazing, and it's not even pushing the P30 Pro to its highest 409,600 ISO setting. If you wanted to go Pro with this shot, you could get even more detail.
You can push the Huawei P30 Pro even further than this. I had the opportunity to take it up to Uluru for some camera testing (disclaimer: I travelled as a guest of Huawei) and captured this very nice shot of a didgeridoo player at 7:48pm at night.
It's a nice enough photo, but I'm using it largely to demonstrate just how dark it was that night. Later on, at 9:09pm at the same location, I used the night mode to take a photo while a talk was being given about the local constellation lore.
Bear in mind that this photo, while not a great composition, was taken later than the previous one, so there was even less light around. The only clearly visible thing I could see was the laser pointer, which you can make out in the photo below as a blue beam.
The Huawei P30 Pro can't actually see in the dark – if you simply point it at a dark room with no other detail it'll return you a black picture – but it's exceptionally good at making the most of the detail that is there.
There's a very slight catch here in low light situations, and it relates to the primary 40MP camera lens. It features what Huawei calls its "SuperSpectrum" sensor, which is much larger than the sensors found on competing smartphones, and it's very much a power player.
Switch to the other lenses – whether you want a wide but low light landscape, or to zoom in on a subject – and you'll quickly lose an awful lot of that quality in low light.
On the subject of zoom, the Huawei P30 Pro features a 5x optical zoom lens with a side-mounted periscope style lens. Huawei combines that with the 40MP primary lens for what it calls 10x "hybrid" zoom. Like the 5x hybrid zoom found on the Huawei Mate 20 Pro, this mostly works very well. Here's an example of it in play in Paris, going from the wide lens through 1x, 5x and 10x zoom:
If you're happy to opt for digital zoom, you can stretch this out to an impressive-sounding 50x zoom, although this is with some significant restrictions. There's no stabilisation at that level, so without a tripod getting your subject right is a total gamble. It also loses a lot of colour and sharpness at that extreme.
You can tell what it is you've photographed, but all too often it looks like a watercolour painting rather than the real world.
These are real people, but you could be forgiven for thinking it's a finger painting.
Still, there's an awful lot to like about the Huawei P30 Pro's camera for still photography, and that's true whether you're a pro shooter or just someone who wants nice looking pictures with minimal effort. Huawei's default camera app encourages you to experiment with colours and focus choices in a way that makes camera photography a simple joy.
However, the same isn't entirely true for its video prowess. Huawei has never been particularly strong in this area, but the gap between how good the P30 Pro is at still photography and its video output is quite remarkable – and not in a good way. Here's a sample of its output taken on a river cruise on the Seine:
For home video it's perhaps acceptable, but the shudder and roll on the boats as it frames them (irrespective of the water movement) is sub-standard. Plenty of other premium phones manage that level of stabilisation so much better than the Huawei P30 currently can.
Hopefully this is a software issue, not a hardware one, and Huawei can improve it over time. As always though, I can only review the device in front of me at the time.
Video aside, Huawei has managed to maintain its absolute position as the best camera phone you can currently buy with the Huawei P30 Pro. What's surprising here is how far ahead of its competition it's remaining while doing so.
Huawei P30 Pro sample photos
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The light and detail in this shot are simply amazing, and it's not even pushing the P30 Pro to its highest 409,600 ISO setting. If you wanted to go Pro with this shot, you could get even more detail.
