DxOMark | The Mate 20 Pro and P20 Pro's rear cameras may be excellent but their selfies are poor

Like it or not, DxOMark has become the industry-leading reference point for smartphone photography evaluation. The website’s evaluation criterion may be flawed but there just aren’t any other platforms doing something similar—testing and evaluating smartphone cameras on a consistent, level playing field. Prior to this week, DxOMark’s reviews focused exclusively on rear camera performance, but the website has finally introduced a new evaluation segment for selfie cameras.

Going by the scores published so far, the position of best selfie camera in the world is a tie between the Pixel 3 and the Samsung Galaxy Note 9. Both devices are two of the most expensive mainstream phones on the market and are also in DxOMark’s top ten for rear cameras.

Interestingly, the number one camera phones on the main leaderboard, the Huawei Mate 20 Pro and P20 Pro, managed to earn massively underwhelming selfie scores. The Mate had a score of 75, while the P20 Pro landed at 72. For some perspective, the Mi Mix 3 and Samsung Galaxy S9 Plus scored 84 and 81 respectively.

As always, we’re leery of the given scores. The iPhone X, for example, earned a score of 71. The Pixel 2 scored 77. Both phones up until a few months ago were regarded as two of the best selfie phones on the planet, and you’re going to have a hard time convincing anyone that the Mi Mix 3 takes better selfies than the iPhone X. But again, this is DxOMark, and their scores are never to be taken as gospel.

That said, Huawei selfie performance has always been sub-par, as the company's phones have a penchant for overexposing pictures, with the final product giving subjects a pale, whitened look—far from the natural skin tone. Some may argue that the company's image processing in this aspect is aimed at Asian users but it remains what it is: unnatural.