We love testing out the latest tech and with thanks to Huawei, we've been exploring their new Huawei P40 Pro phone and its remarkable quad camera.
The P40 Pro is accompanied by the P40 and P40 Plus as Huawei's latest addition to the phone market, and with its highly unified ultravision Leica quad camera sparking plenty of excitement, we decided to test out its potential. Check out how we got on below:
The Quad Camera
The standout feature of the P40 Pro is its phenomenal camera. It renders colours and details magnificently to produce beautiful, rich photographs. The results speak for themselves:
The highly unified ultravision quad camera is co-engineered with Leica, the renowned German camera manufacturer and it’s obvious that it has been designed by a camera specialist. The quad camera is made up of:
- A 50MP ultra-vision camera
- A 40MP ultra-wide cinema camera
- A 12MP telephoto camera
- A 3-D Depth sensing camera
The quad camera set up means that, in addition to producing high quality images, the P40 Pro is also very versatile. It performs really well in low light and the zoom is amazing. It has a 50x digital zoom, meaning that, incredibly, you can zoom all the way in to the moon.
The 32MP front facing camera is also excellent. It intelligently optimises light, skin colour and texture to produce beautiful selfies with great depth. Like the back camera, the front facing camera can record in 4K for ultra high definition video.
Features in the Camera App
The camera app on the Huawei P40 Pro is well laid out and makes it easy to identify the right mode to use in order to achieve the results you want.
Switch to aperture mode and you can blur the background to isolate your subject and get lovely depth in your photographs. The apeture goes all the way down to f0.95 for tack sharp images with a really nice bokeh effect.
Turn on night mode and make the most of the camera's high performance in low light. The P40 Pro’s camera can take in a lot of light, which makes shooting in difficult lighting situations very easy. Light painting is an amazing feature that you can use to easily create traffic trails, star trails or light graffiti.
You can also blur running water to create a silky smooth effect without even using a tripod.
Slo-mo mode is a lot of fun, you can slow your videos down up to 256x. This is great for capturing super-fast action like popcorn popping and the built-in motion detection makes shots like that easy to capture.
There are lots more interesting features like time-lapse, HDR mode and dual-view that allows you to shoot video from two perspectives at once.
AI Photography
There are a couple of really useful AI photography features built into the phone as well.
With AI golden snap the P40 Pro can take a series of 4K moving pictures and recommends 1-3 of the best moments using an algorithm that detects posture and facial expressions. AI remove passerby can even remove photobombers appearing in the background of your pictures at the touch of a button. With AI Remove Reflection you can remove reflections form your photos, which is very handy for taking photos through glass.
The Phone's Design and Display
The P40 is a beautifully crafted phone. The quad curve overflow display inspired by running water. All four edges are curved giving it a premium feel and maximising screen space. It’s comfortable to hold and to swipe with. The back of the phone has a refractive matte finish that looks really really nice in either of the available colours, black or silver. On the front, there’s a bright, vibrant OLED screen.
It looks great in day to day use, the colours are punchy and it’s bright enough to see clearly in strong daylight. The 90hz refresh rate makes it particularly impressive when you’re playing games or watching movies.
Battery Life
The P40 has a highly efficient 4200 mAh. In testing we found that it has more than enough power to get you through the day, even with heavy usage. It also charges incredibly quickly, Huawei’s supercharger can charge the phone from 0-70% in just half an hour. Another cool feature is that you can use the phone to reverse charge, so you can use your phone to wirelessly charge another device.
Apps
This is Huawei’s first phone to launch without Google Play Services. In practice it’s not such a big deal. Sure, there is no Playstore and some apps that you might consider standard such as Gmail, YouTube and Google Maps are missing. However all of those services are available through the web browser. Huawei’s App Gallery has over 45,000 apps and is still growing.
The Huawei P40 range is available from mobile phone providers and from the Huawei website now.
