[Huawei P20 Pro Real Life Review] Halfspark:
I upgraded to this phone from an S7 Edge. It was a fine phone but the battery doesn't hold a charge like it used to. I'll be honest: the P20 Pro was not my first choice but I missed the sale on the Pixel 2XL and, despite my interest in the One Plus, I was hesitant to sign on with O2. The P20 Pro had all these glowing reviews for its camera set up but, now that I've had the phone for a few weeks, I just feel disappointed. There are things I actively like about this phone but none of those are the camera.

Before I talk about that, though, a couple points.

One, it is difficult to directly gauge the colour of pictures taken on this phone because the screen's colour reproduction is way off. Blues are greyer than they should be but so are whites. It is very uneven and there is no fix for it. You can adjust the colour temperature and switch between Normal and Vivid colour modes but changing either will only fix some colours while making others worse. The S7 Edge had a much more accurate colour palette (even if it wasn't perfect).

Two, I primarily photograph animals and landscapes so I tend to keep a more realistic look in my photography. I don't like Photoshop or Gimp, although, I know others do and, when I used to do shoots for people at weddings, etc, I'd use Gimp to adjust the photos for their benefit. The customer is always right.

This camera setup has problems and I'm not entirely sure they're just software related. We all know the software over processes the pictures and there are workarounds but they're not perfect. So far, I've used Camera MX, Open Camera, and Footej. Of those three, Open Camera provides the most options while providing the most accurate colour reproduction. It's an improvement over the stock camera software in most ways but none of the third party camera apps seem able to access the 3x telephoto zoom. Apart from using alternative apps, you can use the Monochrome function in pro mode with no zoom. For some reason, B&W pictures aren't nearly as processed. However, even then, they are merely adequate and not exceptional.

I'm still wonder if there isn't something wrong with the 3x camera. I was able to bring it into a shop and compare it with someone else's P20 Pro and the results were comparable. All 3x pictures contained significant noise and lacked detail. If anything, I'd say this 3x camera can't pull much detail and uses the other cameras to fill in the gaps leading to a picture that looks more like a digital zoom than an optical one. This phone can't handle animal fur at all. My cat turns into an orange blob at 3x even though he's in the room with me and sheep gain white halos. Cows are black smudges in the distance. All detail is lost. It's possible there're good cameras under there but I haven't found them.

At 1x, pictures still manage to have somewhat less overall detail than the S7 Edge.

At this stage, I hope that Huawei completely remakes the camera software from scratch but that would require the company to not only believe there is something wrong but also that it's worth the money to fix it and I'm not sure they believe either. A lot of people like the photoshopped look. They're used to oversharpening and a loss of detail. I'm not. I'm picky with my pictures. I like them clean and sharp with very little if any noise or artifacts. Blurr is a tool, not a club wielded by Captain Caveman.

I think there are people out there who will really like the photos the P20 Pro takes but I'm not one of them.

And don't get me started on that selfie camera. >.<