ISSUE 44 • ANDROID ADVISOR 39REVIEWPhotos) and both portrait mode and ‘wide aperture’
mode. The latter is usable with the standard field of
view which means you can take photos of several
people and still get a nice blurry background.
In portrait mode, results can look great, but it
doesn’t always correctly detect hair. Again, though,
this is only something you’d notice if you zoom in
and look closely.
Around the front the 8Mp selfie camera is decent
enough and you can play with the beauty settings
in the portrait mode and even toggle on the ‘artistic
bokeh effect’ which uses the power of the Kirin 970
to figure out what’s in the background and blur it.
And it works surprisingly well.
The stock camera app has the same interface as
before, but the AI certainly appears to help with scene
recognition. A symbol appears at the bottom-left
corner to indicate what it has recognized.
For example, there’s almost no delay switching to
foliage mode when pointing the camera at a plant.
Similarly, face recognition (and tracking) worked
really well when taking photos of a ballerina –
despite the relatively dim lighting.
Even when its very dark, the cameras are still
able to focus quickly and take sharp-looking
photos with good skin tones.
Each camera has its own ISP (image signal
processor) and these are used in conjunction with the
AI engine to process images according to the type of
scene detected. The processing power is also used to
enable software zoom up to 2x, and the results can be
better than the telephoto lens on the iPhone 7 Plus.