The Huawei P11 may feature a triple-lens 40MP camera setup and a 24MP selfie shooter

A new leak suggests that Huawei may be hard at work on a beastly camera setup for the next entries in its flagship P-series. According to a promotional image allegedly made by one of Huawei's creative agencies, the Huawei P11 may feature a 40MP Leica co-developed triple-lens camera setup with 5x hybrid zoom. Yes, three lenses on the back, 40MP resolution, 5x zoom, and a 24MP front-facing camera to boot.

But that's not all! The promo also portends a dedicated "Pro" night mode that will take full advantage of the "new sensor and optics," which themselves are said to be capable of capturing "100% more light." There's no word yet on how big the camera sensor itself may be, or what aperture(s) will be utilized, but it's a safe bet that the performance boost will come from a clever the combination of hardware and software to deliver better results. Seeing as how low-light performance is still one of the more problematic areas for smartphone cameras, this is great news, provided it's true of course.

Speaking of that, Huawei will be heavily relying on on-device AI to improve photo quality. The new Kirin 970 SoC that will power the P11 and other Huawei phones in 2018 sports a dedicated NPU (Neural Processing Unit), which is partially dedicated to offloading demanding image processing tasks from the CPU. In fact, one of the leaked images specifically touts a "Pro AI camera assist feature," capable of things like "scene recognition" and "auto framing." We don't know what this entails exactly, but it is possible that Huawei's AI-powered tech might be capable of processing images on a per-scene basis, depending on what you're photographing, by cross-referencing your shot to a pre-existing database of other images and applying suitable changes automatically. As for auto framing, this could be a feature that helps you frame better shots by taking into account different objects in the scene and guiding you in how to position them for more eye-pleasing results (at least composition-wise).