Huawei’s Mate 10 Flagships Feature Intelligent Dual Cameras ~ All Things Android

Huawei on Monday debuted its new Android flagship series, officially announcing the Mate 10, Mate 10 Pro, and PORSCHE DESIGN Huawei Mate 10. The latter is essentially a luxury edition of the Mate 10 Pro and while all of the unveiled phablets boast high-end specs and premium builds, their imaging capabilities are advertised as one of their main selling points, especially in conjunction with the company‘s artificial intelligence solutions meant to raise the standards of mobile photography.

The Mate 10-series handsets all feature a dual-camera setup on their rear panels entailing two vertically arranged sensors accompanied by a dual-LED (dual-tone) flash unit. The main imaging system of the new smartphones has been manufactured and optimized by Leica, a Wetzlar, Germany-based optics firm with whom Huawei has been collaborating for several years now. Much like Leica’s recent mobile solutions, the one implemented into the Mate 10 models relies on a monochrome sensor and an RGB one so as to physically separate the modules tasked with capturing light and colors, then bringing their results together on the go in an effort to deliver images that not only have high color accuracy but also preserve details and support a wide dynamic range, in addition to being able to deliver authentic black-and-white photos.

The monochrome sensor is of the 20-megapixel variety and is mounted behind a lens with an aperture of f/1.6, currently the widest one in the mobile industry alongside the lens found on the LG V30. The RGB sensor is a 12-megapixel unit and also used alongside an f/1.6 lens, with both modules supporting optical image stabilization (OIS) and their sensors being of the back-illuminated variety. Phase detection autofocus (PDAF), continuous autofocus, and laser autofocus systems are also part of the package, as is 2x Hybrid Zoom which has yet to be detailed by the company but appears to be almost indistinguishable from regular 2x optical zoom. The Mate 10 and Mate 10 Pro can record 4K video and feature advanced image processing algorithms meant to bring the most out of any photo depending on one’s preferences and shooting mode of choice. Advanced users can also manually control the rear camera setup of the newly announced phones using the Pro mode supported by the default camera app.

The slim top bezels of the Mate 10 and Mate 10 Pro accommodate an 8-megapixel sensor with an f/2.0 lens meant to be wide enough to allow for high-quality selfies even in poor lighting conditions, Huawei said. Both setups were designed to take advantage of Huawei’s AI services like real-time object and scene recognition which is supposed to allow the Mate 10 and Mate 10 Pro to automatically opt for the most suitable shooting mode depending on the subject which the user is targeting. The trio of Android flagships will begin hitting markets around the world later this month, starting at approximately $825.