Tecno Mobile has just announced its Camon 16 series, and its Premier flagship has introduced a dizzying amount of camera tech scattered amongst new TECNO phones. If you’re coming from an older TECNO phone that currently has a single or even a pair, you may find some modest upgrades here. It should be noted that the Camon 15 Premier was announced early this year.
ALSO READ: TECNO Camon 15 Unboxing and First impressions
But first, let’s establish the baseline.
Equipt with four camera sensors, the Camon 16 Premier is set to dazzle. The camera placement and design is inspired by the 2018 Huawei Mate 20 Pro (but TECNO has a larger camera module) with more sensors to fit in.
It’s been only 6 months since the Camon 15 was announced so don’t expect a leapfrog in camera technology for the Camon 16 Premier. The biggest hardware change is a new 64 Megapixel senor at f/1.9 26mm (wide), 1/1.73″, 0.8µm, PDAF lens for the primary camera. That’s a modest aperture increase on the Camon 15 48 Megapixel lens; On paper, it improves the lens’ light-gathering and which should enable slightly faster shutter speeds or less grainy ISO settings in low light but don’t expect an iPhone 11 level of low-light performance.
Camon 16 Premier cameras use two levels of High Dynamic Range (HDR) adding a new HDRA setting in what is now called the AI CAM software enhancement, this is clearly the latest generation of TECNO’s infant computational photography pipeline; it’s optimized for people’s faces and scenes, and also uses some artificial intelligence (AI) to apply adjustments to a wider variety of elements in a scene. This AI potentially improves in night mode, which can now be used on the ultra-wide and duo selfie cameras as well.
The Camon 16 Premier’s wide-angle photography has been bumped up to 8 Megapixel giving for image information compared to the 2 Megapixel on the Camon 15. The last two sensors are what I would consider more of unnecessary lenses. There is a 2 Megapixel, f/2.4 dedicated video camera, and a final 2 Megapixel f/2.4 depth or macro camera to help in those close-up shots and also improve the boketh effect on images (images with blurry backgrounds). It would have been preferable to have a telephoto lens for actual zooming in for that perfect far shot.
The Tecno Camon 16 Premier Selfie game
Up-front there are duo selfie cameras, the main is a 48 Megapixel, f/2.2, 23mm (wide), 1/2.0″, 0.8µm lens that is able to capture lots of information at a 4:3 aspect ratio. You can reduce this to 35 MP or 27 MP but this will give you a 1:1 and 20.5:9 aspect ratio respectively. When you have to shot more people into the photo you switch the 8 Megapixel, f/2.2, 105˚ (ultrawide), 1/4.0″, 1.12µm lens but expect a huge image quality drop.
On top of having a Dual-LED flash– a rare feature on the flagship phones, the selfie camera also supports several modes including slow motion (at 230 fps and 120 fps), Short video, Video, the normal AI CAM, Beauty mode, Bokeh (Portrait images), Super Night, and Panorama modes. All these modes also apply to the main 64 Megapixel sensor.
The main camera can support video in FullHD (1080p), HD (720p), and 480p all recording at 30 frames per second (fps). For still photography, on top of shooting at 64 MegaPixels at a 4:2 aspect ratio, you can reduce this to 48 MP or 37 MP but this will give you a 1:1 and 20.5:9 aspect ratio respectively. You can also filter images in real-time so that you can easily post on your social media soon after taking the shot. The back camera also comes with a Penta-LED flash.
All of this sounds like a perfectly solid, if iterative, set of year-on-year upgrades. That’s only half the story, though, because TECNO did make major hardware changes with the Camon 16 Premier. The most fundamental change is that it has a completely different, much larger primary sensor. It should be noted that a high megapixel count doesn’t necessarily mean a better image. That is why the likes of Samsung or Apple stick to 12 or 16 megapixels in resolution, the larger pixels and surface area mean they’ll capture much more light and should turn out cleaner results.
The Camon 16 Premier should be one of the best TECNO cameras to date — we’re looking forward to finding out just how it actually performs in the real world with a detailed image test article coming soon.
