I know what date it is, but let me assure you it's not an April Fools' joke: Huawei's P30 Pro has the best low-light photography camera, even better than Google's Pixel Night Sight, and sets a new benchmark for night photography.

It's so good it will make iPhone and Samsung Galaxy phone owners question their loyalty. Huawei has taken the most challenging situation for any photographer and made it as easy and casual as taking a picture in broad daylight.

It's still a few days before I can post my full review of the P30 Pro , but I spent last weekend comparing its camera to Google's Pixel 3 and struggling to believe my eyes.

Pixel 3's Night Sight mode is algorithmic magic , which gives the camera something akin to superhuman night vision . It requires up to six seconds of exposure time, during which you must hold the phone steady to get a sharp image.

Huawei has a similar night mode , but I find it completely unnecessary with the P30 Pro: this camera takes better low-light photos than Google Night Sight without the need for long exposure.

Let's dive into some examples. This first one includes the default Google Pixel camera output to give you an idea of what the human eye sees.

It is also an accurate representation of what you will be able to get using an iPhone without the aid of flash or RAW image processing.

Even adapted to the pre-dawn darkness in the room, my eyes could not distinguish any color.

The Google Night Sight image is the best, I'm sure to say that any smartphone prior to the P30 Pro could pull it off under those circumstances.

And the P30 Pro makes that shot look like a smudged mess.

Looking closely, it is evident that the Pixel photo also suffers from a great deal of image noise and graininess, beyond the poor definition of what it actually shows.

Again, most phone cameras would give you a blank black canvas here or completely fail to identify colors.

The Pixel shot is, by any other standard, impressive. The P30 Pro is simply in another league, and the quality of its photo requires no explanation.

The following scene corroborates my conclusions from the first comparison.

Pixel's basic photo gives a good idea of how dark the corridor was (and, don't worry, I turned on the light before I went downstairs).

With Night Sight enabled, Pixel puts up an admirable fight, but there are too few photons to work with for the end result to look tragically ugly.

The P30 Pro shot is far from perfect, hiding some details with a noise-reducing blur effect, especially the fine detail of the window ornamentation, which the Pixel does a better job with, but it's clearly a much better photograph.

You can discern the actual steps in the Huawei image, as well as details such as the wire running along the wall. The P30 Pro also performs a more accurate white balance calculation here, though in my more comprehensive tests,

I should point out that the P30 Pro does not win all the side-by-side contests with the Pixel night view. Going outdoors, I found little difference between their results.

But that in itself is a great achievement for Huawei, which is on a fast and unique exposure, which Google requires the stability of several seconds to achieve.

Few phone manufacturers try to do things like this.

The following example illustrates the closeness in performance between the P30 Pro and Night Sight when there is a little more light to play with.

The less light in an image, the greater the advantage of Huawei's P30 Pro.

In the following example, with an unlit bathroom where my eyes could detect shapes but not colors, the P30 Pro does the amazing by focusing and producing a very respectable image.

With 30 seconds of editing in Google Photos, I can make it look like it was taken during the day.

Pixel's attempt, by comparison, is out of focus.

The Pixel, like the vast majority of mobile and even professional DSLR cameras, cannot get focus with so little.

The sample image below is the best of the multiple attempts I made to bring the pixel into focus.

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