Huawei P9 – Camera Review

Camera is the flag bearer for the powerful Huawei P9 mobile. The front has an 8 MP shooter and the rear has 2 x 12 MP sensors. The performance of the Huawei P9 camera is covered in this post.

Front Camera

The front camera has a wide-angle lens and can shoot sharp details when there is ample light available. The display will light up with white light to serve as flash, if needed. It also that so-called beautification mode and I am not a big fan of it. So I take my selfies with skin smoothening algorithm turned off.

Leica Partnership

Huawei has teamed up with Leica for imaging solutions on their mobile and the P9 is the first mobile out of this partnership. Leica has closely worked with the lens manufacturers to make sure that it is compliant with Leica standards. Also Leica has worked with Huawei to make the camera software, the best out there. One of the sensor captures the actual image in all its RGB glory while the other sensor gives depth and contrast information.

It must not be considered that the other lens can shoot BW, if you hide the RGB sensor. The BW sensor captures the contrast information and interlaces it with the color details from the other sensor to capture stunning images. Now that is a very clever idea. Normally a single sensor system will be overloaded with both the information and the processing may not be good. With the dual lens arrangement the workload is shared and hence effective performance.

Monochrome mode

In the monochrome mode, the BW pictures do come out really well, because of the dedicated contrast details. A Black and White shot rests on the contrast and composition. Hence when you have a dedicated sensor to capture the contrast details, you are bound to get a good BW shot out of it. But that does not mean that this mobile is capable of only BW shots. The information from the BW sensor is interlaced with the RGB details to give punchy colors and realistic images.

The BW sensor captures contrast and depth details. So you can emulate a depth of field like you have shot with a lens of f/0.95. This feature is possible if you shoot in aperture shooting mode. The result is stunning and by far the best artificial depth of field implementation I have even seen in any mobile.

Dual Sensor

Dual sensor arrangement is not new. We have seen such implementations in the past. Some use it for clicking 3D pictures or wide angle shots. But the Huawei P9 Leica dual sensor is the best implementation I have seen so far. The mobile has an advanced imaging solution that would please any photography enthusiast. You need not be a professional photographer to appreciate the quality of image from P9. If you just click the photos in Auto mode, you will end up clicking pleasing shots.

Image output

The images have the right exposure levels and white balance. The contrast is perfect, thanks the dual lens arrangement. The color reproduction is spot on with every single shot. The images from the P9 have a wide dynamic range. The camera excels in both low light and abundant lighting conditions.

The camera has dual focusing system. It employs both laser and contrast focus sensing mechanism. Focusing is fast and accurate. Shutter response time is instantaneous. Even at low light conditions, the shutter response is good, resulting in sharp shots at all lighting conditions.

Camera UI

The camera UI complements the powerful hardware. It is very simple to use under auto mode. It has a bunch of modes to play with. Beyond the pro mode, there are many preset modes, which will give you pro-like shots. I liked the silky smooth water mode, which can help you click water falls or moving stream of water like a pro. There is light painting mode, star trails mode and much much more. You can have fun exploring all these different modes. Leica is known for its three basic color settings. The Standard, Smooth and Vivid. These settings are implemented very well in the P9. My favorite is the smooth mode.

Video

The mobile can shoot videos at 1080p, but it does not have optical image stabilization and the footage suffers from minor hand tremor while holding it. It also has slow motion video, but unfortunately I cannot export or enjoy the slow motion video out of the mobile. Hope Huawei fixes it soon with an OTA. Overall, the video shooting capability of this mobile is just average. But I dont shoot videos with my mobile.

My thoughts

I enjoy clicking pictures and the Huawei P9 is a delightful mobile camera to use. Normally lens manufacturers like Zeiss limit their engagement with just providing the hardware. But in the P9, Leica has gone beyond hardware and have provided software processing technology to aid their hardware. This is a welcome partnership and we hope to see many more such mobiles from Huawei in the future. For now, Huawei has raised the bars in mobile photography with the Huawei P9.

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