Huawei P9 and P9 Plus – The Best Smartphone Cameras out there!

If you are a photography enthusiast, you must have heard about Leica. Leica is German optics enterprise, famous for their cameras. The company started more than a century ago and the fact that they are still out there is a testament to their success. When news came out that the Huawei would be collaborating with Leica for reinventing smartphone photography, everyone was excited.

Now, Huawei seems to have stuck to their word. Their recently released smartphones, P9 and P9 Plus have the best performing cameras that you can possibly hope for in a smartphone.

Going by specifications, P9 and P9 Plus are beasts. There is not much in between them apart from the slightly larger screen and a bigger battery on the P9 Plus. The P9 comes with a 5-inch full HD display along with Huawei’s best chipset, the Kirin 955. The P9 Plus has a 5.5-inch full HD display with the same chipset. According to popular benchmarks, the Snapdragon 820 is the most powerful chipset on the planet right now. Apple’s A9, Samsung’s Exynos 8890 and Huawei’s Kirin 955 come behind. In terms of single core performance, Apple’s A9 processor is still the processor to beat.

P9 comes with 3GB/32GB and 4GB/64 GB variants while the P9 Plus comes in a standard option offering 4GB of RAM and 64 GB of onboard storage. Both the phones’ storage can be expanded up to 128 GB via microSD. But this will use up one of the sim slots. Both the phones come with a USB Type C connector and fingerprint scanner, which is sort of a standard in the flagship phones being released in 2016. Both the flagships comes with Emotion UI 4.1 atop Android Marshmallow. The most impressive feature of both these phones are their cameras designed and developed in collaboration with Leica.

The camera setup in both the phones are similar. They have a dual 12MP camera setup at the rear and an 8 MP camera on the front. The P9 Plus has a lower aperture for the front camera, meaning that it will bring out better pictures in low light conditions. The rear camera has been compared with the likes of a DSLR by some critics. The dual camera setup has been used to combine the better details of both the images to provide an image that has the best details. One hiccup that the camera has been facing is the software. Since the combining is completely done by the software, it needs to be highly optimized. But it is not. Some images may have an unusual amount of blur and may appear washed out. But for most of the others that turn out pretty, there is nothing else to compare them with.

Huawei has made a dormant beast of a phone. They can surely fix the software issues with future Android updates and that will just make it all the more awesome. And we all know that Huawei is one of the very few companies that provide frequent updates. Huawei, we are waiting!