Are you still the best in the business

While its home market in China is the most important, HuaweiA new release has been released for Western audiences in the flagship Mate 50 Pro. Pricing it at a hefty £1,199/€1,199, Huawei still wishes to compete with Apple and Samsung hardware, but you have to scrutinize the broader package at this level too.

As with all Huawei releases, the absence GMS and Google app support continues to be a barrier that most consumers won’t want to hurdle. While Huawei claims the app situation is ever-improving, the workaround remains somewhat cumbersome and still can’t provide all the services or experiences Western audiences are used to.

In the past couple of years, a reason to overlook this lingering issue has been Huawei’s best-in-class camera expertise. Can Huawei still be a leader in mobile photography with the Leica partnership?

As you’d expect from Huawei, the Mate 50 Pro is a well-equipped flagship handset. Highlight features include: IP68 ratingThe battery is a long-lasting 4,700mAh, fast 66W wired charging and 50W wireless charge, and has a vivid, 120Hz OLED display. A large notch has been reintroduced to allow for 3D depth-data-powered face unlock. However, this may have an impact on the overall look.

However, there are some more important caveats. Despite having a powerhouse, Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1 chipset, there’s only 4G modem support onboard. So no 5G connectivity. EMUI 13 is based upon Android 12 (not Android 13As you might imagine, Huawei promises a more below-average two year OS and three-year security updates.

Still, the phone’s highlight, for me, is the design. The Mate 50 Pro weighs less than comparable handsets like the Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra, while the rear Kunlun glass (which boasts Switzerland’s SGS 5-star glass drop resistance) feels great in the hand and is resistant to fingerprints. Not everyone will love the curved display, but the circular, symmetrical “Space Ring” camera housing continues to offer a unique look. Three color options are available from Huawei: black (vegan leather), silver (vegan leather), and silver (silver).

But the real reason you should continue to buy a Huawei flagship is to get the best cameras. The flagship is powered by a 50MP main sensor RYYB with 10-point f/1.4 – f/4.0 variable aperture, 13MP f/2.2 ultrawide, 64MP f/3,5 3.5x periscope camera, 13MP f/2.4 selfie snapper, proximity light sensor, and laser autofocus, backed by Huawei’s Ximage software, there’s plenty to sink our teeth into here.

Let’s take a closer look at how the phone’s camera package performs.

Let’s start out with a broad selection of snaps captured with the Mate 50 Pro before diving into a closer look at some specific scenarios.

These results will please most photographers. The colors are vibrant without becoming too saturated, fine details are present and the main camera can easily navigate HDR and low-light environments. The handset’s white balance is also exceptional, for the most part.

One complaint is that Huawei’s algorithms can result in the odd underexposed and desaturated image, while details can take on a processed look (likely owing to image fusion algorithms) in some situations. Thankfully that’s not a really common occurrence, and it won’t be an issue for the majority of users who never crop in.

While I’m being really picky (which is my job), the comparison with the Galaxy S22 Ultra shows the pros and cons of Huawei’s approach to detail processing.

In daylight, there’s a comparative level of detail to Samsung’s flagship (Huawei actually overtakes in low light). The trade-off is slightly sharper shadows and marginally more aggressive desinse, which creates a more painted appearance on a 100% crop. There’s not a lot in it, but any presumptions that Huawei is well ahead in the detail game no longer hold up.

HDR and low lighting

The Mate 50 Pro is able to handle more difficult environments. HDR capabilities have long been one of Huawei’s strengths, and the phone stands up well next to the mighty Google Pixel 7 ProIn this regard. In our first samples, you’ll find similar highlight preservation and shadow detail between the two. The Mate 50 Pro has a purple tint to the top left that may be chromatic aberration. This could be due to lens distortion from the wide aperture of f/1.4.

The second image is very similar. The Pixel 7 Pro is a little more adept at controlling scene highlights. However, there’s much less shadow noise in the Mate 50 Pro’s picture, possibly in part thanks to its unique RYYB sensor configuration.

You can achieve consistent white balance and detail capture by turning the lights down. We have already seen that the Mate 50 Pro is a bit more aggressive in its processing than Samsung. It trades off less noise for more detail. Personally, I don’t mind a little grain in my images if it results in less distracting sharpening.

The Mate 50 Pro dials up color even in low light, which is odd. This could be because the Mate 50 Pro dials up the color in low light to avoid the desaturation that we often see from minimal light sources. I find the color pop a little too bold compared to the Pixel 7 Pro.

There has been a significant shift in the area of processing compared to previous Huawei smartphones. It could be down to moving algorithms over from its in-house Kirin to Qualcomm’s Snapdragon platform or to the loss of Leica’s partnership. Either way, Huawei’s low-light images, and details more generally, aren’t quite as clean as I recall in past models.

Ultrawide and macro

On paper, Huawei’s ultrawide camera fits even more into the frame than Samsung’s S22 Ultra 12mm, 120-degree lens. It’s actually fractionally broader than the 13mm, 126-degree Google Pixel 7 Pro, making it one of the wider cameras on the market. Take a look at this example.

Usually, I’d be very hesitant about a camera this wide. However, Huawei’s software chain provides rock-solid image correction, chromatic aberration reduction, and denoise. The level of detail preservation is a cut above competing flagship phones, although it’s still notably inferior to the main camera. White balance can also be a bit hit-and-miss and doesn’t always match the main camera.

The 100% corner crop shown above clearly shows superior color capture and detail, but there are still obvious signs of distortion, just like the Pixel 7 Pro. Huawei attempts to correct common purple haloing but we can still spot blue artifacts. The Mate 50 Pro also attempts to correct for its extreme field of view to produce a “flatter” image; the perspective is just so-so in its utility, at least to me. It also has a knock on effect for macro photography.

Huawei, like most flagship phones, offers an optimized macro mode that blends images from both the main and ultrawide camera. It works well, but it relies more on the ultrawide camera that some other phones, which can lead to slightly different perspectives in certain instances.

This will depend on your preference for sharp details or bokeh in macro shots. The Pixel 7 Pro excels at the former, while the S22 Ultra provides nice bokeh. I find the Mate 50 Pro’s perspective too warped here.

Huawei missed a trick to leverage the phone’s variable aperture for much improved macro capabilities. The dedicated mode allows you to toggle the aperture manually. This is great for addressing the dreaded overpowering depth-of-field effect, rather than using the primary lens close up. However, it’s a pain to navigate quickly. I prefer that the automatic macro mode did it for me. These are shots taken with the default f/1.4 aperture and f/4.0 settings.

I’d say the result’s pretty clear-cut here. Overall, Huawei’s ultrawide setup is better than most when it comes to fitting more in your shot as well as preserving image quality to a higher standard. However, I’m less confined by the extreme field of view and macro capabilities.

Hybrid zoom compared

The Huawei Mate 50 Pro camera package appears to have four lenses. However, there are actually three lenses and a proximity light sensor. The third camera is a 3.5x optical lens which, while a good pick for portrait photos, is a step back for long-range zoom enthusiasts compared to the Mate 40 Pro’s 5x optical zoom and certainly not close to the Huawei P40 Pro Plus and its 10x optical zoom capabilities. With its super-resolution zoom technology, Huawei may be able to make up the difference.

The zoom quality is good for medium-range shots. The zoom lens’s colors and detail are good, but not as good as the main lens. It’s much easier to spot signs of sharpening and processing, as is typical for zoom cameras. The zoom limit for a single lens setup is about 5x. By the time you hit 10x, image quality looks just about passable at full frame but certainly doesn’t hold up on closer inspection.

That certainly doesn’t sound as good as Google’s and Samsung’s best, so how does the phone compare to its rivals?

At 3.5x, there’s not a lot to distinguish between any of the three phones I ported around for this shootout. At 100%, details are sharper than the Galaxy S22 Ultra’s roughly equivalent camera but not quite as robust as the Pixel 7 Pro’s super res zoom — at least in the center of the frame; Google’s implementation offers poor details at the image edge. Also, Huawei’s color choice is better than its rivals in the shot above, perfectly capturing the cold, crisp look of a winter’s morning.

At 10x, things are a little more interesting. The dedicated 10x lens on the Galaxy S22 Ultra makes it a leader in long-distance outdoor photography. The Pixel 7 Pro isn’t far behind, and then the Mate 50 Pro is a little behind that. Take a look at the indoor shot.

With non-ideal lighting, the Huawei Mate 50 Pro’s super res zoom technology closes in on the Galaxy S22 Ultra’s periscope camera. While Samsung still provides a softer, more realistic image that’s free from sharpening, Huawei’s entirely software-based approach isn’t far behind at all when looking at the full frame.

Overall, while Huawei has taken strides to surpass the competition in the ultrawide department, the Mate 50 Pro’s zoom capabilities trade blows with but can’t knock out the best in the business. While solid out to about 5x, the phone doesn’t quite offer the same level of detail as the Pixel 7 Pro and can’t quite keep pace with the S22 Ultra at longer range.

Huawei’s portrait photography remains one of the best in the business, offering great subject exposure and rock-solid bokeh edge detection in both outdoor and dimly lit conditions. The Mate 50 Pro also excels at preserving realistic skin tones and textures without the oversharp or smeared details you’ll still often find on other flagship smartphones. Huawei seems to have dialed up the color punch slightly when portrait mode is enabled. The hoodie in this case is red, not pink. Thankfully, the look isn’t overbearing, but again, it’s a bit of a deviation from the more realistic approach we’ve seen from previous Huawei flagships.

Unfortunately, the portrait quality doesn’t carry over to the selfie camera. The Mate 50 Pro has an unnecessarily large field of view, which results in narrow faces and a distorted viewpoint. You can crop the image, but that doesn’t solve the problem. The front camera oversaturates colors to give them more pop, but it struggles with saturation and detail in low lighting. Huawei clearly values group selfies above image quality.

Bokeh edge detection is just as good as its competitors. However, you have to switch the camera to 1x and enable the Circles effect before Huawei’s portrait mode does anything noticeable to the background. Even here, the blur effect isn’t quite as pleasing as the light circles you’ll see from other phones.

Bottom line: There are better selfie-snapper out there. This is a shame because the Mate 50 Pro’s portrait photography is really decent.

As expected, the Huawei Mate 50 Pro wields a competent camera array that’ll have you well covered regardless of the subject matter. Versatility remains one of the camera package’s greatest strengths. It’s an innovative piece of kit too. The variable aperture controls are not as intuitive as they could be, but it’s a powerful tool that allows you to have greater control over the appearance of your photos. I hope that more smartphones will adopt the idea by 2023.

That said, I have very high expectations for Huawei’s camera capabilities, and while mostly solid, there are definitely some uncharacteristic drawbacks here. Hit-and-miss colors, middling zoom capabilities, and a disappointing selfie camera take the shine off a setup that’s commanding a premium flagship £1,199/€1,199 price tag. While there’s still a good camera package here, it’s harder to recommend than previous models, especially when compared to the ever-improving competition.

With Huawei’s main selling point struggling to stand out and the ongoing Google ecosystem trade-offs, the Mate 50 Pro is a tougher ask than initially anticipated. While Huawei photography enthusiasts may still find enough to love here, we’d steer the majority of consumers to the excellent camera and less compromising software packages available from the Google Pixel 7, Samsung Galaxy S22, or even Apple’s iPhone 14 series.