From Challenger to Leader Huawei P20 Pro Product Evaluation

IT 168 evaluation "consumption upgrade" has become the hottest word in the mobile phone circle in recent two years. On the one hand, when consumers buy mobile phones, they not only look at the so-called "cost performance" of the products, but also care about the products themselves; On the other hand, for domestic mobile phone brands, it provides opportunities for brands to enhance their image. For a long time, limited by brand history and supply chain integration ability, domestic brands have always been regarded as challengers of Apple and Samsung. However, when the mobile phone market reshuffles and provides opportunities for domestic mobile phones to promote their brands, they need to change from "challengers" to "leaders".

To be a "leader", we need to test the hard power of the product itself.

In the field of electronic technology, "worshipping foreign things and admiring foreign things" is nothing new. When the P20 series was released globally in Paris, P20 and P20 Pro refreshed the score of DxOMark leaderboard twice in the PPT page after page on the big screen in the center of the stage, which was dubbed as the "Slaughter List" and inevitably aroused everyone's appetite: Is it really that strong? In this evaluation, let's see if Huawei P20 Pro is as strong as the legend.

Structural parameters

This time, Huawei P20 series is divided into P20 and P20 Pro. It can be seen from the naming (suffix Pro instead of Plus) that the two products are not only different in size, but also have obvious differences in product positioning. Of course, this difference is reflected in the hardware part of the two mobile phones. Let's take a look at the table first to see what are the differences in hardware configuration between the two products. Parameter comparison between Huawei P20 and P20 Pro

product name

Huawei P20

Huawei P20 Pro

Screen characteristics

5.8-inch LCD screen

6. 1 inch AMOLED

processor

Kirin 970

Kirin 970

Network mode

Dual card dual standby full netcom

Dual card dual standby full netcom

Random access memory

6GB

6GB？

Fuselage storage

64/ 128 GB

64/ 128/256 GB

front-facing camera

24 megapixel f/2.0 aperture

24 million pixels?

F/2.0 aperture

Rear camera

20 million (black and white)+12 million (color)

Forty million+twenty million+eight million

Product characteristics

AI double shot

Aurora purple color matching/the world's first three-shot

Fuselage size

149.1* 70.8 * 7.65mm.

155.0 * 73.9 * 7.8mm

Battery capacity

3400 mah

4000 mah

operating system

EMUI 8. 1.0

EMUI 8. 1.0

Fuselage color

Bright black/sapphire blue/cherry red gold/champagne gold

Bright black/sapphire blue/cherry red gold/aurora

retail price

3788/4288

4988/5488/6288

As can be seen from the table, Huawei P20 Pro has made some differences from P20 in hardware configuration: the most important three shots, aurora purple color matching and screen material. In this way, for the P20 series, the excellent design of previous generations of P series has been maintained, and P20 Pro has created a rear Leica three-camera, which has become the most powerful smartphone at present.

Design: Aurora is the most beautiful domestic mobile phone I have ever seen.

Six years ago, when Huawei Ascend P 1 was released, the fuselage thickness of 7.69mm was extremely thin at that time, and since then, genes with excellent ID design have also been injected into the P series. Subsequently, the 6. 18mm ultra-thin all-metal fuselage manufactured by P6 laid the foundation for Huawei P series in id design. On P 10, Huawei and Pan Tong cooperated to create the annual color matching and metal carving technology, which enabled Huawei to explore the combination of technology and fashion in ID design. On P20 Pro, the aurora color is more beautiful.

As the main color scheme of this P20 Pro, the aurora color adopted by Huawei P20 Pro is inspired by "light", and the ultraviolet color changes from dark to bright and then to blue. Through nano-vacuum optical coating technology, the design of two-color gradient fuselage is mysterious and fashionable, which reflects different colors from 3D glass fuselage at different angles. Compared with all other products with monochrome body at present, the visual effect is really amazing.

As the main color of gradient structure color, ultraviolet ray is the color of 20 18 published by Pantone with the color number 18-3838. Pure purple itself is bright, which has certain visual stimulation to people, and the color saturation of pure purple is high, which is easy to produce visual fatigue. In contrast, ultraviolet rays are bluer, more active in color sensitivity, and more emphasis on creativity and foresight in visual effects.

On the front of the fuselage, Huawei P20 Pro adopted a 6. 1 inch special-shaped full screen, but it did not compromise, and still put the fingerprint identification module on the front of the fuselage. The higher screen ratio brought by the special-shaped full screen makes the P20 Pro look wider.

On the top of the fuselage, P20 Pro even transformed the receiver into a circle, which is very simple.

Although it is a special-shaped full screen, P20 Pro still puts the fingerprint identification module on the front of the fuselage, keeping the integrity of the back of the fuselage, which is very beautiful.

It is worth mentioning that the 3D glass used on the back of Huawei P20 Pro is curved everywhere, which makes P20 Pro feel that it has not been laid by hand, and there is no redundant treatment at the link between the glass edge and the frame, and the transition feel is very delicate.

Generally speaking, Huawei P20 Pro is the first domestic mobile phone, which really makes me feel that it has top-notch products in design. No matter from the "design sense" at first sight, attention to details and choice of color scheme, Huawei P20 Pro is worthy of inheriting the excellent ID design genes of P series.

Photo experience: There is no doubt that this is the strongest camera phone at present.

Huawei P20 Pro's changes in imaging hardware are radical. Leica is the first to be equipped with three cameras, that is, a combination of 40 million pixel color+20 million pixel black and white+8 million pixel telephoto. If we further analyze the parameters of each camera, we will find that this is a "three-camera combination".

Main camera: 40 million pixels,11.7 inch RGB color image sensor, Quad Bayer structure, f/ 1.8 aperture, equivalent focal length of 27 mm

Sub-camera: 20 million pixels, 1/2.78 inch black-and-white image sensor, f/ 1.6 aperture lens, equivalent focal length of 27 mm

Telefocal camera: 8 million pixels, 1/4.4 inch RGB color image sensor, f/2.4 aperture lens, equivalent focal length of 80mm, supporting optical image stabilization.

In layout, the main camera is in the center, the black and white sub-camera is at the bottom, and the telephoto camera is at the top. Based on this design, the main camera can be combined with the other two cameras to image, which can not only have the high sensitivity of "color+black and white", but also realize the optical zoom of "wide angle+telephoto", which can be described as the "master" of the current imaging scheme.

The surprise doesn't stop there. After further analysis, the sensor area of this main camera is as high as11.7 inches, which is more than twice that of the iPhone X sensor and even comparable to the flagship card machine in the past. It is a well-deserved "outsole". The ultra-high output of 40 million pixels will undoubtedly retain more details in imaging and have an advantage in resolution.

However, for mobile phone products, due to the limitation of unit pixel area, usually high pixel means poor high-sensitivity image quality, and dark light performance will be greatly reduced. Huawei has obviously taken this into account. This "outsole" adopts Quad Bayer structure, four adjacent pixels can be combined into a large pixel image, and the default output is 6.5438+million pixels, which makes the unit pixel area increase to a horrible 2μm, significantly improving the dark imaging performance.

At the same time, we also know that in order to give full play to the strength of this "outsole", Huawei Finland Research Institute reorganized Nokia's former imaging team to participate in research and development. You know, this team has personally built legendary products such as Nokia 808, 1020, and has rich experience in the adjustment of ultra-high pixel sensors. Now all these will be passed down on P20 Pro, so that P20 Pro can strike a balance between resolution and high image quality.

Let's analyze the imaging strength of P20 Pro through proofs.

As you can see, the proofs of Huawei P20 Pro have excellent impression, rich details, good tolerance, eye-catching colors and fast focusing speed. After turning on Leica bright mode, the mobile phone is very sensitive to the presentation of red and green, and with the processing of dark corner shadows, it is often possible to take temperament photos, which is very convenient to use.

Artificial intelligence scene recognition

Based on the NPU of Kirin 970, Huawei P20 Pro supports AI scene recognition, which can instantly identify the main body of the picture, and make targeted style and parameter settings during imaging to improve the final shooting effect. For example, when shooting the blue sky, the camera will adjust the saturation of the blue to reflect the comfort; When shooting food, the camera will adjust the color to saturation and richness to reflect the delicious food; When shooting night scenes, the camera will turn on the super night scene mode to brighten up and reduce noise.

It should be emphasized that the AI of Huawei P20 Pro supports intelligent operations in more scenes, such as automatically turning on portrait mode when shooting portraits, automatically switching telephoto lenses when macro, and providing natural background blur. Obviously, with the blessing of AI, the threshold for mobile photography is lower, and everyone can shoot a blockbuster in their mind.

By default, AI scene recognition is turned on automatically. If you don't want AI to get involved in your own photography, you can also turn it off in the settings.

1-3-5x zoom

Based on three cameras with different specifications, Huawei P20 Pro supports 3x optical zoom and 5x hybrid zoom, in which the optical zoom is based on an 8-megapixel telephoto lens, and the hybrid zoom is based on high-pixel cropping and algorithm support, both of which can provide rich details and give creators more composition choices.

▲ Original film ▲ 3x zoom ▲ 5x zoom Because telephoto is more sensitive to jitter, P20 Pro is equipped with o is optical image stabilization on the 3x telephoto lens to ensure the image quality. As for the five-fold fusion, users need to keep their hand posture for a short time to improve the detailed performance of the picture. Let's look at more zoom proofs.

Excellent super night view

For the super night scene mode, friends who are familiar with Huawei mobile phones are no strangers. In this mode, hand-held exposure can be supported for up to 6 seconds, and clear and bright night photos can be presented. On P20 Pro, the super night scene mode has been upgraded, which can cope with the regular hand shake and support the super night scene. In other words, you can shoot big movies at night without a tripod.

The essence of super night scene is not really long exposure, but the continuous shooting of a stack of photos with different exposure parameters. In order to solve the image offset caused by jitter in the process of shooting multiple photos, Huawei introduced AI algorithm to identify and align objects, and finally presented clear and clean night photos. The so-called 6S exposure is actually the sum of shooting+synthesis time.

From the final effect, the night shooting of Huawei P20 Pro is very eye-catching, the highlights are not overexposed, the dark parts are rich in details, and the noise is well suppressed and very clean.

With the advantage of "outsole", Huawei P20 Pro's night shooting has good quality, but the existence of super night scene mode makes its night shooting level rise to a new height, which is obviously different from existing products and can be called "Bug level".

960fps super slow motion

Similar to flagship models such as Sony Xperia XZ2 and Samsung Galaxy S9, Huawei P20 Pro has added an extra DRAM layer in CMOS, which can record a large amount of data in a short time, thus realizing super slow-motion recording (stop-motion photography) at 960fps, which is suitable for recording moving objects or fleeting moments.

At present, P20 Pro supports 960fps video recording with 720P specification, and I have tried it. P20 Pro captures the shutter in time, and the success rate of capturing fear is high. After shooting, video processing needs to wait for about 5 seconds.

On the whole, Huawei P20 Pro has absolute strength in taking photos with its excellent hardware and AI algorithm upgrade, and the authoritative camera evaluation agency DxOMark also scored the highest score of 109.

System Experience: Continuous Improvement of EMUI 8.0

Huawei P20 Pro is equipped with EMUI 8. 1.0 (based on Android 8. 1.0). Since EMUI 7.0, Huawei has been comparing the version number of EMUI with the version number of Android, and the speed of upgrading the latest system has been the fastest among all third-party OS. First of all, this should be praised by the EMUI team. We can see that Google is actually tightening its authority on the AOSP source code specification of Android system, so when updating the system version (most importantly, new features and security patches), third-party vendors must abide by the AOSP specification. Today, keeping up with the native version of Android plays a very important role in the user experience.

On the optimization of this special-shaped full screen, EMUI 8. 1 also added the gesture operation of single-button navigation. Users can realize the function of virtual Home button by touching, holding, sliding left and right, and clicking left and right icons.

EMUI 8. 1 (left) has been adjusted in the camera shooting interface, and several shooting modes are clearly indicated at the bottom. You can enter different shooting modes by swiping left and right. And the switch button of the front and rear cameras is moved from the upper right corner to the lower right corner, which is convenient for switching the front and rear cameras with one hand.

In terms of details, EMUI 8. 1 (left) is in the call interface, which increases the transparency and makes the system look younger.

In terms of display perception, EMUI 8. 1 adds natural color display, which can adjust the screen color according to the ambient light. For the OLED screen, I suggest turning this function on.

Generally speaking, EMUI 8. 1 based on EMUI 8.0, the adjustment of the full screen of the opposite sex is added, and the details continue to be optimized, and the overall development is towards a flatter operation logic.

Hardware configuration:

Huawei P20 Pro is still equipped with Kirin 970 processor and built-in 5.5 billion transistors. The CPU is designed with 8 cores, 4 * Cortex A73 @ 2.36 GHz+4 * Cortex A53 @1.8 GHz, forming a BigLITTLE architecture with both performance and efficiency, intelligently allocating processing tasks and giving consideration to both performance and power consumption. Thanks to the improvement of 10nm process technology, the energy efficiency of Kirin 970 CPU has actually improved significantly. Gpus are Mali-G72 and MP 12. Compared with Kirin 960, the performance of Kirin 970 is improved by 20%, and the energy efficiency ratio is improved by 50%.

Charging speed

P20 Pro has a 4000mAh large-capacity battery and comes standard with 5V 4.5A super charging. The peak power of 2 1W can be achieved in the actual test. In the half-hour test, P20 Pro also rushed from 0 to 58%. This speed is still a good level in the current Android flagship.

Summary:

Back to the question at the beginning of evaluation, whether Huawei P20 Pro has become a new "leader". In my opinion, the answer is obvious. As a leader, the product should at least be "everyone has me", not just "everyone has me". Huawei P20 Pro, the industry's first Leica three-camera, brings unprecedented imaging quality, which not only makes P20 Pro the most competitive Android phone at this stage, but also truly witnesses the evolution of Huawei P series after six years, from a toddler brand in the Android camp to a leader in determining industry standards.