When you consider which smartphone has the best camera, there are only a few options every year. Until 2020, the winner was one of the iPhones, Samsung’s Galaxy flagship or HUAWEI’s P-series phone. Especially since last year, Huawei has become the most powerful candidate. However, this year, Xiaomi’s Mi 10 Ultra has broken this dominance. And a lot of friends asked us which one has the best camera performance. Well, today let’s take a closer look at these two top camera phones and check out which one is better in the camera department-whether it’s the HUAWEI P40 Pro Plus or the Xiaomi Mi 10 Ultra.

Let’s look at their cameras specs first. Both of them come equipped with insane camera setups and both rear cameras occupy a large area of the back. And when taking pictures or videos, you may even have no idea which camera sensor is doing the job.

For HUAWEI P40 Pro plus, it has a Penta-camera setup, while the Mi 10 Ultra equips 4 cameras. We’ve had already introduced their setups in our review before, so just check them out here if you’ve missed it — Xiaomi Mi 10 Ultra Review and Huawei P40 Pro Plus Review.

To be honest, both of them are excellent camera phones in 2020 and it’s really hard to perceive the differences in their camera samples on their small 6.6-inch displays. So, the difference between these two camera setups is pretty small, especially over good lighting conditions, which means that if you use it for daily or travel photography, you should probably care more about their tones or image style.

Xiaomi Mi 10 Ultra vs Huawei P40 Pro Plus: Main Cameras

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Let’s look at the samples from their main cameras – the biggest difference is their shooting angles. Huawei’s main camera has a much narrower angle, which sometimes was not able to provide the same stunning visual effects for landscape or building shots as the Xiaomi model. But when you look closer, we found that the Mi10 ultra didn’t suppress contour jaggies well while sharpening the image. So at first glance, it seems that Xiaomi’s samples create an illusion that it could have better and sharper detail, but the fact is that the HUAWEI model also produces sharp images and did a better job in anti-aliasing.

And then let us focus on their white balance and color reproduction. The Mi 10 ultra was more stable to adapt accurate white balance, but it generally had cooler tones compared to the Huawei samples. But both of them have excellent contrast detail and wide dynamic range. And it’s really, really hard to pick a winner here. It simply comes down to individual preference.

Xiaomi Mi 10 Ultra vs Huawei P40 Pro Plus: Ultra Wide Cameras

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As we mentioned in Mi 10 Ultra’s review, the phone’s wide-angle camera has a stunning view with a really wide angle. However, a wider angle isn’t everything. It also leads to some drawbacks, such as blurring and noisy detail over at the corners, while the Huawei model maintains excellent reproduction no matter for the corners or the quality at the center.

Well, unlike what we saw in the main camera comparison, this time Xiaomi did a better job in anti-aliasing, but other than that, its wide-angle cameras’ samples were not so different from what we got from their its main cameras under good light conditions.

Xiaomi Mi 10 Ultra vs Huawei P40 Pro Plus: Macro Cameras

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As for their macro performance, both of them are NOT equipped with an exclusive macro camera but utilize the wide-angle camera for macro use. The Mi10 Ultra can shoot subjects with a closer view, while the Huawei’s macro mode is able to produce purer images.

Xiaomi Mi 10 Ultra vs Huawei P40 Pro Plus: Telephoto Zoom

For both models, the amazing zooming performance is advertised as one of their most attractive selling points. The Mi 10 Ultra can shoot up to 120-times zoomed-in photos, while the maximum zoom-in capacity for the HUAWEI model is 60 times. However, we don’t suggest shooting over 20-times zoomed-in photos on these two models. You would find out how meaningless it is and will definitely get frustrated with the outcome at extremely high zoom levels. However, using the phones to capture photos under 10x zoom is very satisfying.

The Huawei P40 Pro features two telephoto cameras, one with 3x zoom and another one with true optical 10x zoom. On the other hand, the Mi 10 Ultra comes with one 2x optical zoom telephoto camera and another one with 5x zoom. Therefore, technically, the Mi 10 Ultra is better at shooting photos between 2x and 3x zoom, and then between 5x and 10x zoom. While the setup on the P40 Pro Plus should enable better zoom photos between 3x and 5x zoom and then 10x and beyond.

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And as expected, our camera test samples roughly proved this theory. The biggest difference between these two models is image resolution. However, thanks to good software optimization, the Huawei model is not far behind in the range, where the Xiaomi model was leading. Especially the Huawei model was more likely to produce a purer image with better noise control. On the other hand, although Xiaomi only features a hybrid 10x zoom, its 10x photos were so impressive that it almost catches up with the optical 10x zoom of the HUAWEI model. But strictly speaking, the HUAWEI phone still won a narrow victory in the race of 10x zoom.

Huawei P40 Pro Plus vs Mi 10 Ultra ZOOM

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Xiaomi Mi 10 Ultra vs Huawei P40 Pro Plus: Portrait Mode

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About the portrait mode, Huawei has an exclusive depth-sensing camera to catch the depth information, while the Mi 10 Ultra only uses the 2x telephoto camera for portrait use. And from the samples, we can see that the HUAWEI phone is more accurate in detecting edges and creating the correct depth information, while the Xiaomi phone can get confused when there are multiple subjects.

Xiaomi Mi 10 Ultra vs Huawei P40 Pro Plus: Night Mode

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These two models both have a night mode for night shooting and the improvement in quality in these two models was also remarkable. but their production is a bit different. For example, the optimized solution of Huawei is a bit smarter to reproduce natural images with a good balance of exposure, while the night mode of the Mi 10 Ultra is dedicated to improving the overall brightness, which leads to lower contrast and strange reproduction in low-light scenes. In addition, sometimes the Mi 10 Ultra was incapable of making adjustments with correct exposure balance and good stabilization under extreme low-light conditions. But thanks to the RYYB sensor, Huawei’s samples looks much more comfortable with excellent brightness improvement.

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Xiaomi hasn’t developed a night mode for the Ultra’s wide-angle camera, so from the samples, it’s not a good idea to use it in night scenes. On the other hand, you can apply night mode for wide-angle shooting on the HUAWEI phone. But actually, the wide-angle camera could also work well without night mode in night scenes, so Huawei no doubt won the race of night shooting. However, we did notice that the night mode samples from Huawei’s wide-angle camera couldn’t exactly present good saturation under extreme low-light conditions.

As for their ability of video shooting, their main cameras both can shoot up to 4k 60fps videos. However, Huawei’s wide-angle camera can also film 4k 60fps videos.

Thanks to HDR Hardware optimization, the Xiaomi model’s video quality is really amazing with a better dynamic range. And compared to the videos shot by the Huawei model, Xiaomi’s excellent image stabilization was also surprising.

Check out the full-sized camera samples from this drive link.

Xiaomi Mi 10 Ultra vs Huawei P40 Pro Plus: Camera UI 

About camera UI and editing experience, there are some things that we didn’t feel comfortable while using these two phones. For example, the Huawei phone has a relatively low-resolution view-finder when we’re shooting using the display. And when we use it to shoot horizontal photos, the zoom options were located at the bottom, which makes one-hand operation become impossible. And compared to the Mi 10 Ultra, there is no such a picture-in-picture view for Huawei’s zoom shooting, which sometimes made finding subjects under zooming a bit difficult. And for video shooting, the Huawei phone would start with the wide-angle camera, but not the main camera which had better image quality. And for the Mi10 Ultra, there is obvious shutter delay sometimes, even up to a couple of seconds.

For photo editing, the experience on the Huawei phone is much better. It not only provides more professional adjustment but also comes up with a few auto-options for you to edit photos quickly. And it also allows users to get a horizontal view when editing photos, while on the Mi 10 Ultra it cannot switch the direction.

But for filter options, the Xiaomi phone no doubt provides more interesting filters. Most of them are pretty good choices for social media. And another highlight is the set of sky filters, which would auto-detect the sky in the image and replace it to the sky option you choose. And the effect is really amazing.

For video editing, they both can do simple editing and can apply filters. And the Xiaomi phone has an awesome auto-captions feature to detect voice and turns it into captions.

Xiaomi Mi 10 Ultra vs Huawei P40 Pro Plus: Verdict

These two models no doubt are great camera phones, but we cannot pick which one has won the whole camera race. The two phones have four to five cameras and each of them has its own advantage as well as shortcomings. So overall, the gap between each of their cameras is so small that you cannot simply pick one phone as the ultimate winner.

The Huawei P40 Pro plus is really a mature model as the brand has a few years of experience developing top-end mobile cameras, while the Mi10 Ultra is an all-around 10th-anniversary model bringing the most creative ideas from Xiaomi to life.

So which one do you think captures better pictures – Xiaomi Mi Ultra or the Huawei P40 Pro Plus?