ACCESSORIES
A collection of the best fun-yet-functional products out there for photographers
A roundup of products for photographers to consider
HUAWEI MATE 20 Pro Huawei has added an ultra-wide camera for its latest high-end smartphone www.huawei.com £899
Huawei was the first manufacturer to introduce a smartphone with a three-camera system and it’s continued this design into the Mate 20 Pro. However, this time there’s a Leica VarioSummilux-H1.8-2.4/16-80 ASPH camera system built in, which means the equivalent focal length range is 16-30mm. This is created from a combination of a 40MP f1.8 wide-angle camera, a 20MP f2.2 ultra-wide-angle camera and an 8MP f2.4 telephoto camera. Unlike the Huawei P20 Pro (reviewed in issue 201), all three of the cameras use a colour sensor, but thanks to input from Leica, you can still get decent monochrome images straight from the phone.
The benefit of using three cameras is two-fold. Firstly, it enables an optical zoom of 0.6x (16mm), 3x and 5x. And secondly, it facilitates the computational photography that drives the Aperture mode. When this mode is selected, the image is tagged with an iris icon, which if you tap it, gives the option to reset the point of focus and adjust the degree of background and foreground blur. It works very well, but it pays to be careful with the widest aperture settings as it can have a miniaturising effect.
Although the Mate 20 Pro’s total pixel count is 68MP, the maximum resolution that’s available is 40MP. However, the default setting is 10MP. This is also the resolution that’s used for all the AI-informed features such as Photo, Aperture and Night mode.
When Master AI is activated in the menu, the phone will attempt to recognise the subject that’s being photographed and apply the appropriate processing. Oddly, it doesn’t appear to have a landscape option and when we photographed landscapes it showed ‘Greenery’ or ‘Clouds’ as the subject, but the results are usually good. Otherwise it identifies the subject accurately, although a dog was pronounced a fish a few times.
You can shoot DNG files and take control over the exposure, white balance and focus settings in Pro mode, but the results from using the automated options are usually very good.