Huawei Ascend Mate 2 Review: Incredible Battery Life & Value

Spatial Resolution

We'll start by measuring the rear facing camera's ability to resolve fine details by shooting at an ISO12233 test target. For now we'll be looking at horizontal and vertical resolution using the sagittal and tangential lines in the upper right of the center of the test chart:

ISO12233 captured by Ascend Mate 2

The gallery below has links to the original chart captures for all of the phones compared in this review:

The Ascend Mate 2 starts out strong. Here we see a great example of how two 13MP rear shooters deliver vastly different performance, even when it comes to resolving fine details. Look at HTC's One mini 2 (13MP) compared to the Mate 2, and you'll see a substantial difference in spatial resolution. The Mate 2 does incredibly well in this test, I see very few signs of aliasing throughout the test range. There's some blurriness beyond the 11 marker but we never really see substantial aliasing.With enough light, the Mate 2 should have no issues retaining fine details.

You can see full 1:1 resolution crops in the gallery below:

The Mate 2 still does relatively well in the tangential crops but I definitely see more blur as we go down the chart. I suspect this has more to do with uniformity across the rear camera.

Color Reproduction

For the next comparison I shot the standard x-rite colorchecker classic card under 6500K light.

The Mate 2 does an ok job with colors. Grayscale performance looks reasonable, none of the colors are oversaturated but they are perhaps a little undersaturated for my tastes. Yellow/green handling is a bit off but otherwise it's a fairly solid performer here.

Lab Scene

As we march towards our outdoor test scenes, we shift to a light controlled lab setup. We'll start with a well lit test:

The Mate 2 does a decent job here, we get a lot of detail in all of the subjects and there aren't any color balance issues either.

Next up is the same scene, but in much lower light (~7 lux):

And this is the Mate 2's weakness. I swear I didn't take a picture of a black poster, this is the same scene as above. The Mate 2 just doesn't drive ISO up (or shutter speed down) in order to even remotely try to capture the low light scene. Huawei seems to optimize for low noise, but in this case the optimization is so extreme that we end up with a completely unusable shot. You can't see either of the CPU boxes, the tablet box on the right is barely visible and you can kind of tell there's a book and paintbrush in the scene. Only the lightbulb in the lower right is actually discernible from the sea of darkness here.

Outdoor Scenes (Night)

Next we transition to some shots on location. First up is the same night shot of a storefront that we used in the Galaxy S 5 review:

Once again the Mate 2 delivers a low noise image, but it's mostly useless. I can make out the sign but there's no detail anywhere else in the scene.

This is one of my favorite shots, there's a car in there, the Mate 2 just doesn't really attempt to convey it. Low light performance is definitely not a strong suit of the Mate 2. There's no dedicated night mode, but if you shoot in Smart Auto the Mate 2 will trigger a lower light mode. Here we get something a bit more useful, it's still not great but I can at least make out the car in the image.

Outdoor Scenes (Daylight)

All of the photos below were taken during the late afternoon with very little cloud cover and tons of sunlight.

The Mate 2 loses a lot of detail here in the crane, the device seems to have trouble dealing with low contrast highlights.

This next scene takes a different angle on the crane and mixes more subjects at varied distances from the camera:

The Mate 2 does a great job dealing with the sky both in color and exposure. The overall scene is a bit softer than I would've liked but overall it's not half bad.

For the last shot I'm looking at a crop of downtown Raleigh, taken from a distant bridge.

Once again we see highlights are washed out a bit, but many devices don't do a great job of properly exposing for the background here. We also see the Mate 2's blurryness rearing its head once again.

Video

The rear camera can shoot a maximum of 1080p30 encoded in H.264 base profile (~20Mbps). In practice I saw frame rates drop as low as 20 fps when shooting 1080p video in lower light indoor scenes.

Rear Facing Camera Conclusions

The best way to put the Mate 2's rear facing camera performance is that it's great for a $300 phone. The 13MP sensor does a good job of resolving fine details, color reproduction is solid and in most (well lit) scenes the module does a good job. Low light performance suffers but it's honestly not much worse than a Galaxy S 4 if you shoot in Smart Auto. There are also the usual set of uniformity and sharpness issues we see at lower price points, but overall the Mate 2's rear facing camera hardware is a good value.