Huawei Mate 40 series to use 9P free-form camera module, could increase photography performance significantly

News regarding the Huawei Mate 40 series has started making appearances online. And now there’s a new report, that reveals some information about the camera technology of this upcoming Huawei flagship.

Lin En-Ping, CEO of Largan Precision said his company has finished the development of free-form and 9P (nine plastic lens pieces) lens modules, with shipments for the former expected to begin in fourth-quarter 2020 and the latter to be adopted by clients in the fourth quarter at the earliest (via DigiTimes).

Largan Precision is a Taiwan based major supplier of camera lens modules for smartphones, tablet computers, and digital cameras, among other devices.

Huawei is a long-standing and one of the biggest customer of Largan, which makes the company first to use this lens in Huawei Mate 40 series.

Back in April, Ming-Chi Kuo, an analyst at TF International Securities, also said that Huawei will use a ‘Free-form lens’ in the high-end version of the new Mate series model that will launch in the second half of this year.

According to the information, a free-form lens is a digital lens with curvatures generated, not molded, on at least one side.  The use of a free-form lens improves the sharpness of vision and reduces distortion at all distances. The result of this new lens provides a more precise level of visual fine-tuning in view.

The use of this free-form lens will surely improve not only the photo quality but also the visual details at all distances, which most of the time distorts due to the focal length of the lens.

In addition to the free-form lens, the 9P module will further improve the light intake capability of the sensor for low light photography. However, Huawei already uses the RYYB color mapping in its camera sensors, which captures much better low light images compared to other camera modules.

Still, RYYB sensors some times pushes extra yellowish effect on the images when a user zooms in to an object. The sensor may improve in the future.

According to the previous reports, Huawei Mate 40 series will be powered by a new 5nm Kirin 1000 chipset, and its launch expected to happen in October.