Huawei P20 Pro vs Sony A7R III: can the smartphone camera take on a DSLR?

Super sensors and pimped-up pixels — David Phelan gets an exclusive shot at the smartphone camera taking on the SLRs
Model and photographer Helena Christensen has been working with Huawei on its new Huawei P20 smartphone range
Jeff Spicer/PA Wire
David Phelan4 May 2018

The best camera is the one you have with you. And since phones can slip into our pockets, the best camera is the one on your smartphone.

But can a phone ever compete with a dedicated standalone camera?

Huawei thinks so. The Chinese smartphone company, now the third biggest in the world, has just released the P20, and its larger sibling, the P20 Pro, both of which are going big on their snappers.

Professional photographers are intrigued and it comes as brides and grooms are choosing smartphones over hiring wedding photographers.

The P20 has two rear cameras and one front-facing; the Pro adds an extra camera on the back. All of them are made by Leica, the German high-end camera and imaging masters: a promising start.

What’s more, the cameras have powerful sensors: one 40MP colour sensor, one 20MP monochrome sensor and, on the Pro, an 8MP colour sensor with three times the focal length of the others, providing an effective 3x optical zoom.

Few cameraphones have actual optical zoom as it requires a thicker gadget: optical zoom is the good kind, whereas digital zoom, found on every cameraphone including this one, is simply cropping in to the centre of the image, reducing the picture’s resolution.

The Huawei P20 Pro has three cameras, one 40MP colour sensor, one 20MP monochrome sensor and an 8MP colour sensor
Huawei

To put the P20 Pro through its paces, I took it on safari — challenging conditions because you’re some distance from your subject and, oh boy, can they move fast.

I tested it against a high-end camera and several other smartphones with decent cameras. The high-end model was the Sony A7R III, a phenomenal camera with a telephoto lens so big it made me look like a paparazzo (100-400mm).

Its pixel count is around the same as the colour sensor on the Huawei, though the significantly larger sensor means pixels can be bigger, making for better results, theoretically. Here’s how they measured up.

All night long

The clear winner here was the Sony, which is hardly a surprise, but the Huawei delivered strong results.

Although I also used the iPhone X and Nokia 7 Plus, both of which have great cameras, I quickly gravitated to just using the Huawei in lower light, where it excelled.

A dedicated night setting can punch up every available bit of light so what was pitch black to human eyes was visible to the camera. It achieved this by a combination of long exposure and clever software.

The Sony could manage long exposures but even with a tripod — not necessary for the Huawei’s Super Night Mode — could not match the smartphone’s result.

Sony had the advantage that it could take me right up to the action with one twist of the mammoth lens, at full resolution. The Huawei lost some picture quality at extreme zooms, as did the other cameraphones.

The Sony A7R III DSLR (Sony)

But the real standout on the P20 Pro is its use of AI to spot what you’re shooting. If it sees you’re taking a photo of food, it brightens the colours to make it more sumptuous-looking.

Snap a pet and the word “Dog” or “Cat” appears onscreen (though not if the cat is a lion, it turns out) and the photo is tweaked to improve Fido’s fur or Tibbles’s eyes.

Mostly, the results are impressive, with enriched skies and greener vegetation. Apple does a lot of this automatically, so you are dependent on Apple engineers having excellent taste (fortunately, they do).

All four gadgets were fast, with no shutter lag. Sometimes Huawei’s different modes meant the subject got away before I’d chosen how I was shooting. But I also lost images on the Sony because the autofocus homed in on grass in front of a lion rather than Leo himself.

Take it easy

Huawei and Apple stand out. Both make a virtue of simplistic, point-and-shoot photography, though Huawei has a Pro mode which adds a great deal of manual control.

Huawei sharpens images after you’ve taken them, by taking multiple shots and combining them to make the best shot.

Extra mile

Nokia shoots using front and back cameras simultaneously, but Huawei had the most to offer here: super-slow motion shoots at up to 960 frames per second for up to six seconds.

Having the monochrome sensor made for sensational black-and-white images where other phones can yield grey approximations.

The Huawei P20 Pro camera boosts AI which can recognise the image's subject
Huawei

Get a grip

You can’t beat a dedicated camera for ease of holding. The finger grip on the Sony camera so perfectly fits the hand that you really can’t drop it while phones can be less easy to manage.

Proper buttons that click under your fingers are more reliable and easier to use than touchscreens — though the Sony was huge, heavy and required a bag to carry safely, and you might miss a shot while removing the lens cap.

The verdict

The best photographs are still taken on a dedicated camera. But the best cameraphones can deliver tremendous results. The additional benefits are simple sharing of images to social media, not to mention features such as slow motion and high-resolution video, and items such as Huawei’s fearsomely good Super Night Mode.

Price-wise, the P20 Pro costs around £749 (and it makes phone calls, too!) while the body of the Sony AR7 III is £3,200, and lenses are extra: £2,500 extra for the 100-400mm lens I tested.

Portrait capabilities on phones like the Apple iPhone X and Huawei P20 Pro can create depth-of-field effects where your subject is in pin-sharp focus and the background elegantly blurred. Of course, every advanced camera can do this, though it requires the user to have a little specialist knowledge.

For price, simplicity, convenience and genuinely clever software, the camera on the Huawei P20 Pro is hard to beat.

But for pure picture quality, the Sony AR7 III is still ahead by a distance

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