Huawei Y Max: First Camera Samples

Huawei's latest 7-inch phablet has arrived with a large and beautiful display and mid-range worthy specs, but does it take good pictures as well? Let's find out.

The rear dual cameras

Related: Huawei Y Max 2019 Unboxing and First Impressions

The Huawei Y Max features an AI assisted 16MP f/2.0 main and 2MP f/2.4 secondary camera with LED flash rear camera set-up and an 8MP f/2.0 front facing camera.

The camera app is familiar if you've handled Huawei camera apps before but with the AI button now on the left side as compared to previous versions where the AI button was hidden in the menu. 

Front facing camera

The first set of camera modes are the Aperture, Beauty, Photo and Video. Other modes can be found under the "more" option. This includes Panorama, Time-lapse, Slow-mo, HDR, Watermark, Pro, AR Lens and filter modes.

Aperture mode allows for an artificial bokeh up to f/0.95 while the Beauty mode allows for up to 10 levels of beautification. Video mode has live face beautification while Photo mode allows you to scan QR codes and items you are shopping for and do an internet search about the items in the picture.

Pro mode is robust with controls for ISO (100 to 12800), shutter speed (1/4000th of a second to 8 seconds), EV, metering and white balance. It is one of the more complex Pro mode in its price range.

Let's take a look at the first few images!

Camera Samples

Y-Max rear daylight 

Y-Max rear indoor

Y-Max rear indoor close-up

Rear camera aperture mode

Rear camera lowlight

Daylight selfie

Indoor selfie

Selfie Low light

Quick thoughts

The large 7-inch display of the Y-Max

The Huawei Y-Max's camera performance out of the box is inconsistent. If we looking at the images from the Huawei Y-Max, the day light images are dark even though they were taken in broad daylight with colors that are washed out.

But if we look at our indoor shots, the colors were accurate with good contrast and has decent sharpness.

In low light, the Huawei Y-Max struggled the most with images are soft because of the heavy noise and the heavier noise reduction.

There were also situations where the app would freeze mid-use. I was taking pictures of a scene for a few minutes and then it would stop taking pictures. In order to fix it, I had to close the camera app completely.

We think that these issues are because of early software that can be fixed in the future.

As of this writing, our version of EMUI is the latest and we hope Huawei can address these issues in the future.

So right now, we can't recommend the Y-Max if you aim to mostly use it for taking pictures.

What do you guys think?