Camera Review: Shot using the Huawei Y7 Prime 2019

Huawei’s latest device, the Y7 Prime 2019, very well stands out in its design. It looks good, and it feels good. It also has great battery life plus the performance is quite good despite featuring the Snapdragon 450 processor. But what about the cameras?

There’s a 16MP selfie shooter, plus a 13MP+2MP rear setup that has AI support. Specs might be good on paper, but that’s not what people look for nowadays. That’s why this post focuses on the cameras by sharing a couple of pics taken by the phone. The pics are in different lighting conditions and are uploaded to this site in their full quality without any retouching, so click to expand/view full size.

As someone who used the Y7 Prime 2018, this year’s phone is a great improvement not only in the cameras, but also in performance and battery life.

Artificially Intelligent (AI) Cameras:

While reviewing the TECNO Camon 11, I told you I didn’t quite get the reason they said their cameras have AI. Because the AI in that phone did nothing.

With the Y7 Prime 2019, you actually see the AI in action. Okay, point your camera at a person, and you’ll see the live preview automatically say ‘Portrait’ after recognising the person’s face. It will then adjust the lighting and settings to focus on the face of the person whilst applying some natural blurring to make the shot look good.

The camera recognises very many different scenes, from food to animals, to vehicles to plants. I was particularly impressed with how it could pick up the difference between a ‘Building’ and an ‘Ancient Building’.

I love that the AI works, you can see it in action differentiating different scenarios and actually adjusting the lighting, focus and saturation to compensate for, or to make the shot different as per the subject.

With AI vs Without AI

I noticed that the field of view decreases a little bit when shooting in AI Mode. The colours become deeper and more saturated. Also, details, especially with text, and skin tone is more visible.

With AI shots are also significantly larger in terms of actual size of the file. For example an without-AI shot can be 5MB, while the same shot is 10MB with-AI.

With AI:

(Scroll down to see the Without-AI versions of this)

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Without AI:

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Landscapes:

Here are a couple of shots I took of landscapes. Most are normal without AI, but a couple are with AI. You will be able to tell the difference depending on the level of detail, or saturation. I think this is where this camera really shines – when the lighting is good, and the shots are wide. 

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Selfies:

I asked https://www.instagram.com/wairimukiama/ to take a couple of selfies with the 16MP shooter, and here they are:

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Portraits:

There’s both portrait mode and aperture mode on the camera app. With portrait mode, you get what you take. With aperture mode, you have the option to refocus by touching where you want the focus point to be.

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Low Light Shots:

In low light, the cameras tend to lose so much detail, and sometimes getting the focus is really difficult. But here are some low light pics.

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Full Gallery (60+ pictures):

I have included many many more pictures here taken in different conditions. Click to expand and view in full quality. If you are using a larger screen, I’m sure that will be to your advantage right now.

What are your thoughts on the Huawei Y7 Prime Cameras? What stands out? Check out Related Posts to see where to buy the phone, and my unboxing and first impressions post.