Last year Dan was impressed with the camera in Huawei’s P8, and this year’s Huawei P9 kicked it up another notch. It seems the Huawei Mate 9 has gone another order of magnitude better, and while we’re not scheduled to receive the Mate 9 in Australia for a little while, its photographic prowess is quite something else, to the point that we think it’s worth sharing some sample photos with you.
Like the P9 before it, the Mate 9’s camera is co-engineered with Leica, and in conjunction with a 5.9-inch display, a meaty Kirin 960 octa-core CPU designed by Huawei, 4GB or RAM, 64GB of standard storage, a 4,000 mAh battery, USB-C and more, the phone sounds like a real power house. In fact, it sounds like one of the better phones on the market right now.
The camera in the Huawei Mate 9 has two image sensors; a 12MP sensor and a secondary f/2.2 20MP monochrome sensor designed to capture extra sharpness and detail, shadow and highlights. On top of the dual-lens magic, the Mate 9 camera also has OIS and 4K video capability. Even the front sensor looks good, with an 8MP sensor and f/1.9 aperture.
You can check out the full gallery on Flickr here.
Yup the P9 is amazing to use – I even don’t mind EMUI so long as Nova is on top of it.
I am loving all these approaches to being used to get amazing shots from phone cameras.
The use of the incredible dynamic range of the monochrome sensor to provide a impressive tone map for an image that is then combined with the colour sensor output to dramatically improve the final image.
This mate 9 is showing some promise.
Its great to see how smartphone manufacturers are looking to use the brute force of the device processors to deliver incredible images compared to an SLR approach, where its more about the single frame (figuratively speaking).