Why does my Huawei P10 show blocky sky artifacts, especially when zooming?
Asked 10/11/2017
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2 answers
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On my Huawei P10, some photos show large block-like artifacts in blue skies, often following the contour of trees or hills. The photos are already affected before any editing. Example settings were around 1/800–1/1200 s, f/2.2, ISO 50, at 8 MP. Other photos taken moments later in similar conditions look completely normal.
After more testing, I found the issue seems tied to the phone’s digital/"2x Hybrid Zoom": photos taken without zoom look fine, while many zoomed shots show these artifacts. Does this point to a hardware problem, JPEG compression, or a camera app/firmware processing bug?
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
8y ago
2 Answers
29
I would suggest that it might actually be a sensor fault (or firmware bug).
My reason for suspecting this rather than JPEG artefacts or banding is that the surrounding sky has exactly the same gradient but is rendered correctly. Also, JPEG artefacts would tend to be noticed in areas of higher detail, but those look great.
If this only tend to happen in large flat areas like that example of sky, then it may be a bug in the JPEG codec in the camera's firmware. It may be skipping encoding blocks based on estimating that they contain no detail, but that skip algorithm may be over-eager. Or, since this is happening in a highly-saturated part of the image, it may be a fault in the camera's internal color space conversion. Either way, this shouldn't happen in a normal camera.
If corruption like this happens regardless of content and always tends to be in the same area of the sensor, I would suspect a hardware sensor fault.
If it does have a RAW mode then this may give you more information about where this problem lies but probably won't help you solve it, unfortunately...
Originally by user3422. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user3422
8y ago
0
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This is most likely a processing/firmware issue, not a sensor defect.
The artifacts resemble JPEG/block-processing problems, but the fact that they appear only on some shots—and especially when using the Huawei P10’s digital/"Hybrid Zoom"—strongly suggests the phone’s image-processing pipeline is causing it. Community replies also noted it could be a JPEG codec, color-space conversion, or other firmware bug rather than a true hardware failure.
Because unzoomed images are normal, the sensor itself is probably fine. A true sensor fault would usually show up more consistently, not mainly when digital zoom is engaged.
What to do:
- Avoid digital/hybrid zoom and crop later if possible.
- Check whether the camera app offers a higher JPEG quality setting.
- If available, test RAW capture or another camera app.
- Make sure the phone firmware/camera app is updated.
- Report it to Huawei, since it appears reproducible with zoom.
So the evidence points to bad in-camera processing during zoomed capture, not damaged hardware.
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