Huawei Mate S review – Camera

A 13MP camera, complete with optical image stabilisation, a two-tone flash and enough modes and settings to keep anyone happy sits on the Mate S’ back.

It’s a good camera that captures detailed shots quickly, but it can’t quite match the standards set by the Samsung Galaxy S6 and LG G4.

Let’s start off with the camera app itself. If you’ve ever used an iPhone, it’s virtually the same experience here. Along the bottom you can flip from picture taking, to video mode to time-lapse and the frankly bizarre beauty mode, while at the top there’s the ‘selfie switcher’ – I’m coining that phrase. The switcher activates the phone’s 8MP front-facing camera. It’s a clean layout and switching between modes is fast, which is important.

Pictures taken in daylight come out looking really good. Colours are accurate and there’s a nice depth of field when taking macro shots. The auto-focus is also fantastic – it locks onto target in a snap.

(Good colour accuracy with HDR mode on, impressive that it doesn’t overexpose the sky)

(Plenty of detail here, with a nice blur in the background)

(You can see the oversharpening here, it’s not too drastic, but worth mentioning)

As with most phones, things deteriorate in less than perfect conditions. The optical image stabilisation means shots taken at night aren’t totally blurry and full of noise, but the focus does find it a bit harder to lock-on. This means photos taken at night are often out of focus.

My only issue with the camera is that the software does do a lot of sharpening in post-production, so the shots can sometimes look a bit fake when you zoom in.

If you want more control over your shots, there’s a very impressive pro mode that lets you manually focus and control white balance and ISO.

Video is capped at 1080p, so there’s no 4K recording.

Finally, the front-facing 8MP is really good – as long as you turn off the Beauty mode that makes everyone look like aliens with large eyes and overly soft skin. There’s a flash on the front too, but I’d suggest only using this when you have too.