Huawei’s Pura 80 Ultra Has A Pioneering Zoom System

Huawei’s P series of smartphones are known among phone enthusiasts for setting several smartphone camera trends, including pixel-binning (debuted in the P20 series); night mode (also P20 series); and Periscope zoom lens (P30 Pro).

Well, the Chinese tech giant’s latest, Pura 80 Ultra, has another breakthrough, one that I think other Chinese brands will follow suit in coming years: a dual-lens Periscope camera.

This is a single Periscope camera module and single image sensor, but with two physical lenses, and a shifting prism inside the module moves back and forth between the two lenses as needed to reproduce two optical zoom length.

The two optical lengths consist of a roughly 80mm, 3.7X zoom that is ideal for portraits and quick closeups, and a 220mm, or about 10X magnification zoom that is ideal for capturing subjects from far away.

A real 10X zoom doesn’t just produce sharper details, but it also exhibits true background compression — meaning the background appears closer to the subject — which is a trait of telephoto lenses. As a test, I took two shots of my friend, at 3.7X and 10X, while keeping the framing relatively the same, we can see the 10X shot has stronger background compression.

In the below collage, I snapped both shots while standing in the exact same spot, with the ultrawide lens, and then the 10X zoom.

The Periscope camera’s sensor size is also the largest in the industry, at 1/1.3-inches. Huawei has not disclosed the brand of the sensor, but reports from China indicate it is a China-made sensor, not a Samsung or Sony sensor (which most smartphones use).

Such a large sensor, along with an equally capable 1-inch main camera, results in a gigantic camera bump, and Huawei does not shy away from the bump, making it an integral part of the phone’s design. I must say, the design has grown on me a bit. I found it quite unsightly at first, but now, it has its charms.

The phone also has a beautiful 6.8-inch OLED screen and a solid chip self-developed by Huawei. Software zips along fluidly with no lag. But ultimately, this phone is all about the camera system. In the video below I have done a more in-depth testing with more photo and video samples.

I need to do more testing, but right now, I’d say the Huawei Pura 80 Ultra is easily one of the top two smartphone cameras in the industry right now along with the Vivo X200 Ultra. Whether the Pura Ultra is number one or number two requires more testing which I will do next week. The Pura 80 Ultra is on sale now in China and will soon go on sale throughout Southeast Asia and Europe.