Huawei P20 Pro to get automatic slow-mo video recording, other camera improvements in upcoming update

Earlier in the year, Samsung heavily publicised a similar feature on the Galaxy S9 and S9+ with its "Camera reimagined" campaign, while Sony stepped their game even further by introducing 960fps video recording at 1080p. For reference, the S9 and S9+ can also do 960fps but it's capped at 720p resolution.

As smartphone chipsets become more advanced, such features are becoming more commonplace, so it's not a big surprise that Huawei also implemented a similar feature in its latest flagship, though it lacked Samsung's smart action detection that kicks the slow-mo into gear. Well, to be absolutely fair, we were not overly impressed with the way automatic motion detection worked on the S9 and S9+, so we mostly found ourselves initiating slow-mo recording manually, but here's hoping that Huawei improves on this in the update.

The problem with this type of feature is that you have just a fraction of a second to react and tap the record button. Smart detection—when it works on the S9 models—really does help things a bit. The problem is, it rarely works in the way you want it to, and instead, in our experience at least, enables slow-mo at seemingly the worst possible moment.

Another change coming in the update for the P20 Pro, discovered by the XDA community, is a revamped zoom interface, which will allow users to swipe in the camera viewfinder to smoothly zoom in and out on a target. This feature will presumably act similarly to LG's Point Zoom feature on the V30, which allowed for very nice, very smooth zooms, but was unfortunately hindered by the lack of optical magnification on the V30. However, with the P20 Pro, which has excellent zoom capabilities of up to 5x, this could be a very useful and unique feature.

For the full scoop on Huawei's latest flagship phone, check out our in-depth review of the Huawei P20 Pro.

Update: The headline of this article previously suggested that super slow-motion video recording was coming to the Huawei P20 Pro, when in fact the update will add a way to automatically initiate this type of video capture via motion detection. The Huawei P20 Pro has had slow-motion video since the beginning, but the option to initiate it automatically will be introduced in an upcoming firmware update. We will update you further on other possible features that this update may be bring to the phone as it gets closer to release.

source: XDA