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Introduction
The announcement of the Huawei P9 was met with much fanfare surrounding the inclusion of Leica branding. The Huawei P9 features a dual camera set-up, which was claimed to have been designed in conjunction with the historic camera manufacturer. There has since been doubts cast on the exact involvement of Leica, but none-the-less the Leica branding is found on the back of the P9. Both of the cameras on the back of the Huawei P9 are 12 megapixel BSI CMOS sensors, with f/2.2 max aperture lenses. One of the cameras has a colour (RGB) sensor, while the other only shoots monochrome. Huawei says that this means the dual set-up can capture more light and detail than a standard single-camera setup. Although there’s two cameras, only one image is captured at a time. On the front of the Huawei P9 is an 8MP f/2.4 camera. Other features include compatibility with micro SD cards and Android 6.0.
Ease of Use
The Huawei P9 ships with Android 6.0, so if you’re coming across from another Android phone that uses the same OS, you should be very at home with the P9. If perhaps you’re coming from an iPhone or Windows phone, you may need to spend a little time readjusting, but it’s pretty easy to use.
On the back of the Huawei P9, towards the top and middle of the phone, is a fingerprint sensor. If you set this up, it allows you to unlock the phone without entering your passcode or pattern. If however you only want to use the camera, you can simply press the unlock button on the side of the phone, and swipe up on the screen from the bottom right hand corner. You can open the camera app once you’ve unlocked the phone by tapping on the appropriate icon, too.
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| Front of the Huawei P9 |
You should see that the camera launches in whatever configuration you were last using it in. You will also see that the fonts and terminology used are the same as in Leica cameras, a nod to the partnership with the famous brand.
In order to move between the different modes and options that are available to you, you can utilise a swiping action. You can use “Pro” mode by swiping up from the bottom of the camera area. This will allow you to control various aspects of the camera – we’ll go over this in more detail shortly. If you swipe from the left you can choose a different shooting mode – the default is called simply “Photo”, while the there’s also options such as HDR, Slow-Mo, Night Shot and Beauty available. Swipe from the right and you can alter some of the camera’s settings, including switching on the ability to shoot in raw format and image resolution size. If you’re not shooting in Pro mode, you won’t be able to switch on raw format shooting.
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| Rear of the Huawei P9 |
Let’s assume you’re shooting in standard Photo mode without the Pro section swiped up. Along the top of the screen (or left hand side if you have the phone in landscape orientation), you’ll see some icons. There’s a flash icon, which you can switch to automatic, always on, always off or lightbulb mode.
Just next to this is a lens icon, which allows you to switch on one of the Huawei P9’s most talked about features, the shallow depth of field effect mode. With this switched on, you select an aperture on the screen, and the camera will shoot as if you were using a very wide aperture lens. You can even change the focus point and aperture after you’ve taken the shot, since this is an effect added post-shot, rather than actually utilising a real wide aperture. If you are using this feature, you need to switch it off again before you can go back to using Pro mode.
To go back to the icons at the top of the main screen, there’s three circles overlapping each other, which activates the different digital filters that you can use, including “Valencia”, “Nostalgia”, “Dawn” and “Halo”. The final icon on the top of the screen allows you to switch between using the rear cameras and the front camera.
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| The Huawei P9 – Camera Settings |
At the bottom of the screen, you can tap to look at images you’ve already taken. If you’re opening the camera from the lock screen, you’ll only be able to look at images you’ve taken in the current session, but if you’re opening the camera from the main menu, you’ll be able to look at all the photos you’ve taken. On the opposite side at the bottom is an icon for switching to video recording.
Now to go back to the Pro mode. Once you have this activated, you’ll see a range of changeable options along the bottom (or right hand side if you’re holding in landscape format). To make changes to the settings, you tap on whichever setting you want to change, and then using the slider which appears to move to the position you need. The options here are metering, ISO, shutter speed, exposure compensation, AF mode and white balance. ISO, shutter speed and white balance all have automatic options, which you can leave them in if you prefer. It’s not possible to set aperture, which is a shame.
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| The Huawei P9 In-hand |
In the top right hand corner, you’ll see that there’s a sun icon which sometimes appears. This is if you’ve made changes to settings which the camera thinks will result in an incorrectly exposed image. If you tap it, all of the settings will return to the automatic defaults, or, in other words, what the camera thinks is best for the situation. It’s a handy tool which helps you to know whether or not you have made the right settings changes, but it can be confused in some situations – such as using a very long shutter speed.
Although there’s not anywhere near the level of control afforded if you shoot in the standard Photo mode, you can change exposure compensation – after you’ve tapped an autofocus point you’ll see there’s a small sun icon appear – if you drag your finger up and down near the AF point box, you’ll be able to add or remove brightness.
In order to actually take a photo, you have a couple of options. You can use the virtual shutter release which appears on the screen when you’re using the camera in any mode. Alternatively, you can set up the physical volume button on the side of the camera to take a shot. This is a little awkwardly placed to take the shot with your right hand, so you’ll probably find you use your left hand – something which takes a bit of getting used to if you’re used to using a standard camera where your right hand controls the shutter release.
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Image Quality
All of the sample images in this review were taken using the 12 megapixel JPEG setting, which gives an average image size of around 4Mb.
One of the biggest claims that Huawei made about the P9 is that detail would be improved by having the two sensors. It would seem that, in good light, that theory is correct as the phone is capable of taking some fantastically detailed shots – especially for a phone camera. If we look at shots taken at low ISOs (100-200) for something that contains a lot of detail, it’s an impressive performance.
Step up to mid-range ISOs and darker conditions though, and the performance is a little underwhelming when compared to the hyperbole of the press materials about the Huawei P9. The overall impression of detail is good, so to be fair if you’re only using the phone to share images online or perhaps print small, then ISO speeds of 400 – 800 are fine. However, if you examine at 100%, you can see that there’s quite a bit of image smoothing and loss of detail going on, even as low as ISO 400. At ISO 3200, images are fine, but again, don’t stand up well to close scrutiny, especially if you are shooting in pretty dark conditions.
You can shoot in the universal raw format – DNG – with the Huawei P9. By looking at corresponding raw files it’s possible to see how much noise reduction and processing goes into the JPEG files – if you want to bring back some lost detail you could do that in post production. Of course it’s perhaps questionable how many average mobile phone users will bother with that – especially given that raw shooting can only be used when switching on the Pro shooting mode.
Directly from the Huawei P9, colours are well saturated with a satisfying amount of punch, especially again at the lower sensitivities. Automatic white balance copes well with a range of different lighting conditions, producing very close to accurate results when faced with artificial lights. Similarly, all-purpose metering does well to produce accurate exposures in most conditions.
The shallow depth of field mode produces incredibly mixed results, and again, is not exactly up there with what a DSLR can produce. Most of the time, the results look fake (which they are) and as if you’d created the effect in Photoshop. You can experiment with the mode, and it works better for some subjects than others, but it feels more like a gimmick than anything else.
Noise
The Huawei P9 has 6 manually-selectable ISO sensitivity settings available at full resolution, ranging between ISO 100 and ISO 1600.
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ISO 50 (100% Crop) |
ISO 50 (100% Crop) |
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ISO 100 (100% Crop) |
ISO 100 (100% Crop) |
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ISO 200 (100% Crop) |
ISO 200 (100% Crop) |
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ISO 400 (100% Crop) |
ISO 400 (100% Crop) |
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ISO 800 (100% Crop) |
ISO 800 (100% Crop) |
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ISO 1600 (100% Crop) |
ISO 1600 (100% Crop) |
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ISO 3200 (100% Crop) |
ISO 3200 (100% Crop) |
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Focal Range
The Huawei P9’s fixed focal length lens is equivalent to 29mm in 35mm camera terms. Digital zoom is available, but with a corresponding reduction in image sharpness.
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29mm |
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Digital Zoom |
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File Quality
No image file compression options are available, but the Huawei P9 can shoot at various resolutions and aspect ratios.
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12MP (4:3) |
9MP (16:9) |
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9MP (1:1) |
8MP (4:3) |
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6MP (16:9) |
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Macro
The Huawei P9 able to focus as close as 5cm from a subject. We found this claim to be accurate, though autofocussing does occasionally struggle to lock on at this kind of range.
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Macro |
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Flash
The Huawei P9 uses an LED flash, and as usual for this technology, it gives a much weaker flash burst than a standard xenon camera flash. Shooting a white surface from a distance of 1.5 metres reveals the flash is unable to properly light the scene and there’s significant vignetting.
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Flash Off |
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Flash On |
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Night
Thanks to the optical image stabilisation and a wide f/2 maximum aperture, the Huawei P9 performs fairly well at night. This image was taken at the camera’s iso 100 sensitivity, and though there’s some noise and detail smoothing, the result is still comparable to what a typical compact camera would produce.
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Night |
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Effects
The Huawei P9’s camera app includes eight filter effects, but this being a smartphone, extra effects are only an app away.
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Panorama
The Huawei P9’s automatic sweep panorama mode works well and lets you stop panning at will. The results aren’t always perfect, but ghosting is rare. Unlike most regular camera panorama modes which produce significantly downsized images, the Huawei P9 has enough processing power to capture at high resolutions, so panoramas are usually around 3000 vertical pixels.
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