Check out Huawei's crazy periscope camera in teardown video

We have recently reviewed Huawei’s P30 Pro and one of the standouts features here is the absolutely insane periscope lens. While we have seen it in action, we have never actually seen how it looks. Popular YouTube JerryRigEverything has put the handset through a teardown and we get to see the 5x optical zoom camera module. What’s even astonishing is how incredible it is that Huawei managed to fit the telephoto lens and mirror in such a slim device.

From the video, we see that though the camera module may not look very large, to accommodate it in the P30 Pro, Huawei had to make it sit sideways. In most cases, smartphone manufacturers position the sensor exactly behind the lens.

A lot of factors need to be taken into consideration while adding a camera stack to a handset especially the thickness. The width of the camera stack depends on if the camera is able to lie flush with the chassis as is the case with the LG G8 ThinQ, or raised in a camera bump like seen on the iPhone XS and the Huawei P30 Pro. The video shows that by adding a periscope lens, it allows for a clever way to zoom as it offers a significantly larger canvas with which to implement camera hardware such as this.

The Verge states, “Theoretically, you could get an even longer zoom: periscope lenses could extend deeper into a phone’s internals if manufacturers make room. Should Huawei (or other companies) run with this idea, the main challenge is figuring out what else they’re willing to sacrifice (say, some of the battery capacity) to lay a longer lens inside. Such a change might require the internal architecture of phones to be remapped.”