Huawei Mate 20 Pro beats iPhone XS Max, Galaxy Note 9 and Pixel 3 in Camera quality

DxOMark just uploaded their review on Huawei’s latest flagship Mate 20 Pro, giving it an overall ranking of 109, thereby beating all the major flagships from other companies.

In the latest smartphone camera rating by DxOMark, Huawei’s flagship has once again topped the charts scoring a whopping 109 points in camera category, equaling the record of the current champion Huawei P20 Pro. The breakdown of the score suggests a lot of similarities between the P20 Pro and the Mate 20 Pro. The only major difference between the two smartphones has been in the ‘bokeh effect’ where P20 Pro scored 70 and the Mate 20 Pro scored 60. That’s a bit surprising considering Mate 20 Pro came later and was expected to be equipped with a better implementation of ‘Bokeh’ effect.

The current top 10 smartphone cameras by DxOMarks are:

Huawei Mate 20 Pro (109 rating)0
Huawei P20 Pro (109 rating)
iPhone XS Max (105 rating)
Samsung Galaxy Note 9 (103 rating)
HTC U12+ (103 rating)
Xiaomi Mi Mix 3 (103 rating)
Huawei P20 (102 rating)
Google Pixel 3 (101 rating)
iPhone XR (101 rating)
Samsung Galaxy S9 Plus (99 rating)

Break down of Mate 20 Pro camera score

Photo

Huawei by far has been the only company to use the triple camera in a cohesive manner, which is evident from the rating and results. Still, images show pleasant colors, good exposure, and fantastic dynamic range. The well-balanced approach results in detail retention and noise reduction. Thanks to its 3x optical zoom lens, the Mate 20 Pro is also one of the best smartphones for taking zoomed in pictures.

However, the Mate 20 Pro does have some shortcomings. For example, its front camera compared to its competitors is mediocre primarily because of the beautification and over-softening of the image. This highlights a major flaw in Huawei’s smartphone camera and that is the absence of quality computational photography, unlike the Google Pixel lineup.

Video

The Huawei Mate 20 Pro achieves a very good Video score of 97 points, just one point below the P20 Pro. Its only real weak points are the stabilization that generates a noticeable drift, and noise in low light. We calculate the overall video score using the following video sub-scores: Exposure (84), Color (90), Autofocus (98), Texture (58), Noise (78), Artifacts (84), and Stabilization (92).

The focus of the smartphone manufacturers in camera category was divided in 2017 and 2018, where some companies preferred superior hardware technology while other companies, mainly Google, focused on computational photography and stressed less on the hardware side of the spectrum. However, the latest change in camera rating and numerous leaks suggest that 2019 will be the year of triple-lens, tetra-lens, and Penta-lens camera setup. Who knows, we might even see a Pixel phone with a dual or triple rear-camera setup.