Re: 50x optical zoom?
To be grudgingly fair to El Reg, I did notice after posting that they have a separate article about the P30 Pro: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/03/26/huawei_p30/
Thanks for the link to the video, too :)
However, as per the various rants over on Ars (https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/03/new-huawei-phone-has-a-5x-optical-zoom-thanks-to-a-periscope-lens/), the P30 doesn't have "true" zoom. Instead, it has:
1) A "1x" 40mp lens
2) A "5x" 20mp telephoto lens
3) Some funky algorithm which allegedly offers "10x" lossless zoom
So anything other than 1x or 5x involves some form of digital zoom and/or cropping.
And presumably, anything beyond 5x is purely from the 20mp lens alone, unless they're feeding data from the 40mp lens into their magical "AI" lossless algorithm.
It's a bit of a shame that the guy in the video above didn't mount the phone on a tripod before playing with the 50x zoom, as the shakiness made it hard to get a good look at how well it performed. It did look like there was some visual distortion going on as he reached the upper limits of the zoom, but that could just due to the fact that it was being handheld.
Any which way, I think it's safe to say that "50x" zoom is pretty much just a marketing exercise: as the aforementioned video cliip shows, it's pretty much unusable in a handheld device and I'd be surprised if anyone ever uses anything above 10x on a regular basis.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
