At a massive special event in Paris, Huawei unveiled the new P30 and P30 Pro smartphones. The two devices, coming in two sizes with 6.1-inch and 6.47-inch Ultra FHD+ displays, are set to prove wrong anyone who thought that we reached peak-innovation in smartphone cameras. 
Both devices sport a triple camera “traffic light” setup, with a new SuperSpectrum 27mm lens on top, an Ultra wide-angle lens at the center and a zoom lens at the bottom. The SuperSpectrum lens is certainly the most interesting of the bunch: Huawei swapped green with yellow on the sensor’s Bayer filter for higher light throughput. That’s no easy feat: it means the company had to completely re-engineer all the camera software architecture to make it compatible with the light reading coming from the sensor. 

The result is a ISO sensitivity as high as 409600, which is extreme even by professional DSLR standards. Except for shooting pictures in pitch dark environments (which Huawei touts as an actual thing you can do), the upgraded sensor can capture more light in any situation, meaning that the autofocus can be faster and the quality of daylight shots is also improved by the lack of noise. Also improving drastically: Huawei’s camera night mode, which pieces together different low-light shots to elaborate a well exposed picture with the help of AI. 

The P30 Pro has a couple of other photographic tricks up its sleeve, namely a periscopic 5x zoom lens, and a TOF (Time Of Flight) camera. In the zoom lens a prism reflects light at 90-degrees, channeling it through a series of horizontal lenses before hitting the 8MP sensor. The TOF is technically a fourth camera but it’s not used to shot actual pictures. Instead, it generates a 3D depth map of a subject and its surroundings, which is then used by the software for Augmented Reality applications or, more prominently, for shooting portrait mode pictures with multiple layers of focus blur. The result is a natural bokeh that challenges the optical performance of a DSLR.

Design-wise, P30 and P30 Pro draw inspiration from the Mate 20 series, unveiled by Huawei in October, more than their P20 and P20 pro predecessors. The technological platform is also quite similar. The SoC is a Kirin 980 with a dual NPU; RAM memory starts at 6GB for the P30, 8GB for the P30 Pro; storage starts from 128GB for the P30, and goes up to 256 and 512GB on the P20 Pro. Both P30 and P30 will ship in Europe today, with prices starting at 799€ for the P30 and 999€ for the 128GB P30 Pro (1099€ for the 256GB version).