If you like over-denoised, over-saturated, over-contrasted, and over-sharpened images, that look impressive mainly on your brilliant little smart phone display - this camera is for you. BUT if you like to capture naturally looking memories with enough details to even survive some zooming-in - it isn't. When assessing the images this cam makes many - if not most - look like being painted with a brush.
Boasting Leica photo optics is great for marketing - but if you expect the extra Dollars to reflect in image quality you will be disappointed. The problem is actually not the hardware but rather the post processing that Huawei applies to the Raw-Data of the sensor. The camera sees and captures a lot of information and has every potential to deliver superb images - but then Huawei's clumsy mathematics step in they actually destroy all aspects of a potentially good image.
Let me show you an example with just one snap shot I had taken without peticular care. All pictures below have the exact same resolution. The left image is what a freeware raw converter (RawTherapee) has made out of the camera's DNG file without any custom settings except for selecting sRGB as output profile. The center image is with some subtle edits I applied, which I feel improve the picture without changing it's general nature. The right picture is what Huawei's camera makes out of it when it automatically generates the jpeg together with the raw file. This matches the auto mode (cof) which I assume most users will use.
What you see below is just another portion of that same picture.
Yes, I do compare uncompressed data with a jpeg file - which may seem a bit unfair (it isn't in this case). So for the sake of completeness below you can see that compressing the image to about 1,5 Megs size with quite aggressive settings would still retain the overall impression and the details of the picture.
The good news is that the problem can be fixed by programming. So Hauwei has every chance to remedy. All that is needed is that Huawei pays attention to these kinds of critical reports.
Pratical every day experience strongly deviates from lab type testing results. Huawei, please fix your image post processing! And while we're at it: Your HDR Mode on this camera performs badly too. For example most of the times instead of gaining details in the shadows - you lose even more (worked better on my former Huawei).
I'd have more to say about the camera but what I mention here is my major concern. I'd love to see you take this into account in future releases.
All the best, and eagerly waiting for updates,
Daniel
P.S. Please forgive the careless cropping of my screenshots as I originally didn't intend to publish them. But I really want Hauwei to improve so writing this up allows for quick sharing of this link and possibly for gaining more attention than when explaining things via email.
Refers to: EMUI 8.0.0, Android-Version 8.0.0, Camera Version 8.0.0.300
