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Red Hydrogen One: The first look at the shaky image
by Dominik Bärlocher
Red Hydrogen One: A look at the camera provides answers to a user question
6.12.2018
Translation: machine translated
User Swisslas asks how the Red Hydrogen One's camera performs. A brief comparison with a unicorn provides answers and raises questions.
My experiments with the Red Hydrogen One are still ongoing. But I can already give you a brief update, because reader Swisslas asked the following question in the comments column:
I would be very interested to know how good the camera is? (probably almost the most important thing on a smartphone these days!) Is it a world better than the other frontrunners?
That's an interesting question, because the Hydrogen's camera is unlike any other camera built into a smartphone. Instead of answering this question for you, let's do it this way: I'll provide the pictures, you provide the answer.
The output of the camera
In detail, it looks like this. I grab editorial mascot Horny, go to the Zurich shop, where I find stable lighting conditions, and take the following pictures with a shoulderpod.
The EXIF data gives me the following information:
- Size: 4056x3040 pixels
- Resolution: 72dpi
- Colour depth 24bit
- F-Stop: f/1.8
- Exposure time: 1/100
- ISO: 140
The same image from the camera of the Huawei Mate 20 Pro, on the other hand, looks like this
The EXIF data:
- Size: 3648x2736 pixels
- Resolution: 96dpi
- Colour depth: 24bit
- F-Stop: f/1.8
- Exposure time: 1/140
- ISO: 50
For comparison out of competition: The same image from the Sony a7sii:
EXIF data:
- Size: 4240x2832 pixels
- Resolution: 350 dpi
- Colour depth: 24bit
- F-Stop: f/2.8
- Exposure time: 1/100
- ISO: 80
The difference is obvious. The Hydrogen One does not have as wide an angle as the Huawei Mate 20 Pro. Otherwise, the images differ mainly in terms of colour, where the Huawei Mate 20 Pro's image looks cleaner. If you want to view the images in full size, you can download them here.
What you don't see
But it gets interesting when we compare it with the large camera. Where the image from the Huawei Mate 20 Pro looks piccobello finished, the image from the Hydrogen One has a somewhat unfinished touch and is more like the unprocessed image from the Sony camera.
I'm not entirely sure, but I suspect that the Hydrogen One deliberately dispenses with AI bells and whistles. With Huawei's phone, the master AI is busy calculating, optimising and thinking. In contrast, the professional cameras take exactly the picture you see on the screen.
This is valuable in that you get exactly what you see on the screen. No "Please wait, sharpening photo" or anything like that. Click and you're done. This confirms the theory that the Hydrogen One is more of a tool than a smartphone.
So, that's it. I'll keep at it and try to find out more about what the Hydrogen One can do. If you have any questions, let me know in the comments column and I'll see what I can do. <p
Journalist. Author. Hacker. A storyteller searching for boundaries, secrets and taboos – putting the world to paper. Not because I can but because I can’t not.
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