【2016 Archives】

016 Archivesbest smartphone camera on the market, according to photography benchmark company DxOMark's experts, belongs to a smartphone that you'll probably never buy: Huawei's new Mate 30 Pro.

This phone, DxOMark says, takes amazing low-light photos with very little noise and more accurate colors than its predecessor, the P30 Pro. Its telephoto camera offers 3x zoom – less than P30 Pro's 5x zoom – but actually performs better in most scenarios, trailing only when you really push the zoom to its limits.

Bokeh shots are also quite good, and wide-angle camera is excellent (the Mate 30 Pro uses a 40-megapixel sensor for both the main and the wide-angle camera), though its field of view is a bit narrower than on most competing phones.

The Mate 30 Pro is not nearly as good when it comes to video recording, but it's still among the best of the smartphones, trailing only ever so slightly behind Galaxy Note 10+ 5G. Also, the selfie camera could use some improvements, though it's still in the top five according to DxOMark.

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All of this was enough for DxOMark to award the Mate 30 Pro's camera an overall score of 121, far above the competition (the Galaxy Note 10+ 5G is in second place with a score of 117).

It all sounds nice, but it mostly serves as a sad reminder of the Mate 30 Pro's near-uselessness anywhere outside of China. Due to a trade ban imposed on Huawei by the U.S., the company cannot pre-install Google services on its Mate 30 series devices, meaning most users in Europe and the U.S. will find them barely usable (not to mention the fact that the Mate 30 won't even be available in the U.S., and, it seems like, some European markets).

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