Camera HW Scores #003: Mate 40 Pro, Nokia 8 V, and More!

In this week’s update, we’re looking at the mobile camera hardware strength of high profile phones such as the Huawei Mate 40 Pro, the Nokia 8 V 5G (a rebrand of the Nokia 8.3), the OnePlus Nord N10, and more.

A few words about our mobile camera HardWare benchmark called Camera HW:

The score accurately ranks the hardware strength of an unprecedented number of mobile camera systems (135 as of today) thanks to a proprietary algorithm that gauges the cameras’ potential based on their technical specifications.

The algorithm is sometimes tuned and adjusted with real-world image analysis from our image-based Camera IQ benchmark (IQ = Image Quality). We answer common questions in our Camera HW FAQ. The full list of cameras is at the bottom of the page.

New camera hardware scores for Nov 11, 2020

	Camera HW
Huawei Mate 40 Pro	230
Nokia 8 V 5G	149
Nokia 8.3 5G	149
OnePlus Nord N10	138
Micromax In Note 1	99
Huawei Mate 10 Pro	89
Huawei Mate 9 Pro	83
Moto One Action	80

Not surprisingly, the Huawei Mate 40 Pro has this week’s most powerful mobile camera, with an overall score of 230. For reference, this is slightly lower than the 236 score of the P40 Pro and the 238 score of the P40 Pro+.

As you know, OEMs sometimes do not reveal the full technical data, so we also use secondary sources. We are in touch with Huawei and are also waiting for devices tear down from 3^rd parties if additional technical information is revealed by these.

However, the score accurately represents a slow down in the incredible pace of advancement that Huawei cameras have experienced since 2018. Keep an eye out for our full Camera IQ image analysis coming soon, as the iPhone 12 Pro Max is just about ready to be analyzed at the same time!

In the meantime, do not miss our iPhone 12 family camera hardware analysis, with the 12 Pro Max being “the” iPhone camera to get this time.

The Nokia 8 V 5G is Verizon’s version of the Nokia 8.3 5G and gets a Camera HW score of 149, making it a somewhat expensive camera for the price.

For instance, the OnePlus Nord N10 gets a slightly lower Camera HW score of 138 but costs considerably less, with an expected sub-$500 price.

The affordable Micromax In Note 1 (~$150) has launched in fanfare abroad with an extremely aggressive value-proposition in terms of specifications for the price. Yet, it gets a camera score of 99, with a seemingly very decent Primary camera, accompanied by a very weak Ultrawide camera that we expect to perform very poorly in low light.

After adding the Motorola Moto One Action, we noticed that it gets a camera score of 80. Still, some of this can be explained by the fact that one of the cameras is only used for action video-recording and doesn’t earn any still photography point. The same was true for the LG Wing.

We’re now officially adding the camera hardware scores for the Huawei Mate 10 Pro (89) and Huawei Mate 9 Pro (83), which we computed when we looked back at ten years of camera competition between Huawei, Samsung, and Apple recently.

Finally, we have a data update for the Samsung S20 Ultra and Samsung Note 20 Ultra, which lead to a tiny bump in scores, but that was just enough to displace the Xiaomi Mi 10 Pro down one spot at the top.

Remember that the Galaxy S20 Ultra and Galaxy Note 20 Ultra have two vastly different zoom cameras, which are why their scores are not strictly identical, even though the real-world performance is comparable. Get all the details in our image-quality analysis camera review of the Note 20 Ultra.

That’s it for this week, but you can go back to previous updates, including update #002 with the LG Wing and update #001 with the Pixel 5. For the full list, head to our Camera HW homepage.

Hubert Nguyen
Categories: Cellphones, Photo-Video
Tags: Camera Benchmarks, Camera HW, Huawei, Mobile Camera, Motorola, Nokia