Some new renders of Huawei’s upcoming P30 Pro show that the handset will have four cameras after all, with the fourth camera situated away from the main array.
To bring you up to speed on the story, on Feb. 25, Digital Trends posted an article about how it had found an inactive prototype of the P30 Pro at Mobile World Congress. The phone’s due to debut in just under a month at a launch event in Paris, so it wasn’t out of the question to find a finished looking device at the conference.
Highlights of the dormant phone were its three-camera rear module, possibly containing a 50mm 10x optical zoom lens and a shiny chrome-style finish. Sadly, photography of the front of the device was prohibited, so we won’t know what kind of front camera solution Huawei will have picked. There wasn’t any information about specs to be had either.
Digital Trends said it was told the device it was looking at was the P30 Pro, although previous leaks have suggested the Pro will instead feature four rear cameras, which has been backed up by an image posted by Huawei’s consumer business group CEO Richard Yu on Weibo, which showed what looked to be an obscured quad camera watermark. Digital Trends suggested that the model it was looking at might instead be the P30 Pro’s 5G version, which would explain the discrepancy.
MORE: Motorola's 5G Mod Is Coming This Spring
So the question is: if there are indeed four cameras on the P30 Pro, where does the fourth go?
Well if you look at the renders released by German technology website WinFuture (via TechRadar), which are at the top of this page, we have a potential answer. The fourth camera, likely a Time of Flight sensor due to its size, goes to the right of the main array, with a flash above it.
Comparing this to the handset Digital Trends photographed, and we can see how the long narrow cutout containing the flash has moved from below the three sensors, and has gained a lens of its own.
It also looks like the bottom lens could well have a 10x zoom similar to what Oppo showed off at MWC. If you closely, there is a square around this lens much like Oppo's variant.
On the other hand, the P30 renders show the flash in the same position as the Digital Trends model, but oriented horizontally, with a couple of smaller sensors (probably not cameras) beneath it. Both sets of renders show a water-drop notch, rather than a move to the punch-hole approach used by stablemate Huawei on the View 20.
WinFuture claim that its renders are official (according to machine translation at least). So the only way we can reconcile these images with what Digital Trends showed us is if we take the DT handset as a weird 5G offshoot of the main design, or it’s not as finished as it was lead to believe.
We will just have to wait until Mar. 26 to find out the truth.
