Is DXOMARK LYING? HUAWEI P60 Pro In-Depth Camera Review: After 3 Months!

So, DXOMARK’s smartphone rating can be pretty suspicious because sometimes they get it right, and sometimes you can’t fully trust their overall ratings. And since this phone, the HUAWEI P60 Pro, is STILL at the number ONE spot after several months of its release, I decided to give you my full in-depth camera review after using this phone for 3 months.

As usual, during my long-term reviews, I won’t be talking about the specs and all the marketing jargon, but I will show you the results and give you my take on each of the photos. 

 

Ultrawide Lens

Now, let’s start off with the daytime ultrawide lenses. Usually, for smartphones, there are two issues with this particular lens. Firstly, it is not as sharp, especially on the edges. And the second part, which usually always irritates me, is the consistency of the color from the main lens to the ultrawide lens. 

But as you can see in these photos, putting both the ultrawide lens and the main lens side by side, it produces the same image quality and the same color reproduction.

Now, just looking at these ultrawide shots alone, you can see that these pictures do not have any barrel distortions, and the pictures not only had an amazing dynamic range, but they were also sharp from edge to edge. 

 

Main Lens

Then, going over to the strongest lens, the main lens, the sharpness and the details for different shades of color were easily produced, and all the pictures that you see over here are taken in a point-and-shoot manner without playing around with the settings or adjusting the colors in post. 

As I usually never edit photos for my smartphone cameras, but I have to say that if you love taking photos of your food, this will be your best friend.

 

Telephoto Lens

Now, another lens where a lot of smartphones fail is through its telephoto lens, because even when I tested other smartphone cameras, nothing comes close to this telephoto lens.

3.5x Zoom

In these 3.5x zoom images, you wouldn’t even guess that it was a 3.5x zoomed-in photo because the performance of the zoom was almost like I was literally standing in front of my cat Luna when she was sleeping. And even in this picture of the building, you can see the textures, which you usually cannot see when taking the picture from afar.

 

10x Zoom

Now, if you think that the 3.5x zoom telephoto lens was great, well, look at these 10x zoom images. The details on this Sonos logo and the holes on the speakers look like I’ve taken this photo on a macro lens. Now speaking of which, I will show you the super macro mode shots later, so stay tuned for that.

And looking at these 10x zoom images of Luna once again, there is no way I could take a shot of her this close without waking her up. 

Then finally, looking at this shot of the Sheraton Hotel in Shanghai, it is also a 10x zoom, and you can clearly see how sharp and detailed the images were.

 

Digital Zoom

Now, continuing on to the digital zoom, here’s a photo at 50x zoom and 100x zoom on that same Sheraton Hotel logo. 

And here are some photos taken towards the evening at 50x and 100x zoom at the W Hotel, focusing on the logo as well. 

And here’s where, although the 50x zoom quality was decent, I wouldn’t go past that unless I really need to because I’m personally extremely happy with the performance of the 10x zoom, as seen earlier. 

But do let me know, do you always take pictures at 100x zoom very often? 

 

Portrait Mode

Next, let’s look at the portrait mode shots. Now for objects like food and flowers, it did a very great job on the overall edge detection and subject-to-background blur. 

Then, taking portrait mode on humans was also great, with similar high-quality results and amazing-looking bokeh.

 

Super Macro Mode

Turning over to the Super Macro mode, since there’s no dedicated macro lens for this, thank God for that, it is using the telephoto lens and the camera app AI that will detect as soon as you place the phone very close to the subject, and it produces some amazing results, as you can see over here.

 

Day Selfie

Then, to finish off the daytime shot, selfie photos on the phone were really great too. And even with several pictures in the shot, they still turned out great without any issues with balancing the overall skin tones, even when it was taken toward the evening. 

Like the rear lenses, the portrait selfies also had great dynamic range, edge detection, and, once again, very, very accurate skin tones.

 

Ultrawide Lens (Night)

Alright, switching over to the night mode. The great thing to love about the ultrawide lenses using the night mode is the sky’s color accuracy because I love how the skies are black with a nice little illumination at the area of the building. 

The highlights and the shadows are perfectly balanced with no signs of noise at the darker part of the image, where the ultrawide lens is usually the Achilles’ heel for other smartphone cameras, especially at night, and that was not the case over here.

 

Main Lens (Night)

Now, I think by now you’d already probably guessed and predicted how well the main lens would perform at night, and your guess is right because here are some very good shots for you to see how well the main lens performed and overall looked stunning, especially with the Night Cityscape on the AI mode as well. 

 

Telephoto Lens

But personally, I did not predict how well the telephoto lens performed because take a look at this image of the Oriental Pearl Tower. Both the 3.2x zoom and the 10x zoom images were stunning, as you guys can see, and you would never predict that these shots were taken on a smartphone.

Now, another huge reason to use these telephoto lenses is because the AI detection seems to work very well on the telephoto lens a bit more so than the main lenses, where it detects and triggers AI actions like the sunset between 1x to 20x zoom to get better-enhanced sunset shots, as seen in these images. 

And here’s where you can get this particular XMAGE to get the AI to detect to get the best moon shots too, and this could be very apparent when you’re switching between the main lenses to the telephoto lens, and yes, up to 100x zoom images, as you can see over here.

 

Low Light Portrait Mode

Now, the portrait mode at night also performed very well too. To all of my and the whole entire team’s surprise, whether it’s for objects, my cat, or any day, it performed extremely well on humans too, with amazing bokeh being produced with the background lighting and a light shining on the hair, which does produce a better image separation too, as seen in these images as well.

 

Night Selfie

Now, taking night selfies was a no-brainer because even with little to almost no light, the overall image processing did a very pleasing image, and this was the first time ever I was feeling super confident in taking nighttime selfies on a smartphone without the images turning up bad.

 

Video

[Sample video footages are available in my YouTube video]

Rear (Day)

Next, going into the video recording mode. Now, during the day, the ultrawide lenses were high in quality with gimbal-like image stabilization, and the main lenses also performed even better, and the image stabilization over here was really amazing too. 

 

Front (Day)

Then the front camera performed extremely well, both from a quality perspective and image stabilization too. And just so you know, HUAWEI is the only Chinese smartphone maker that has 4K video recording on the front camera.

 

Rear (Night)

The same can be said for the nighttime videos, and it was really nice to see how well-balanced the highlights and shadows were at night, especially since it’s on video, again something which a lot of other smartphones do not perform very well under low light. 

 

 

Front (Night)

And if you’re planning to vlog at night, no worries because I also had similarly great results for video recording for the front camera too.

 

Other Camera Features

Now, of course, if you dive in deeper into the camera app, there are other features like the Slo-mo, Light Painting, which is something that I don’t usually use, and I’m sure that a lot of people may or may not use this very much. But if you want to use them, it also works very well. 

 

Conclusion

So, that’s the overall in-depth review of the camera’s performance, and with that, I truly believe that DXOMARK’s score has got it right for this particular smartphone on giving the number one spot for the smartphone’s camera’s performance.

And since there are Google apps easily available on the phone, things like storing photos on Google Drive or emailing them to the family on Gmail, and even more usage for Google-related apps, there are no more limitations of using a HUAWEI brand smartphone. But do let me know what you think after seeing these pictures, a worthy number one spot? 

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