Introduction
HTC made a big splash the other day with the announcement of their next flagship, HTC One. Besides the general upgrades in almost all departments, they also presented us with a new type of camera. First of all, it's part of an elite club by offering optical image stabilization much like the Nokia Lumia 920. And secondly, instead of increasing the megapixels of the sensor, they've actually decreased them, while keeping the physical sensor size the same. As a result, the photosites on the HTC One sensor are up to three times larger than on regular 12-13MP cameraphones.
Both of these innovations bring a promise for exceptional low light performance, which should read as: longer hand-held exposures, high levels of detail and low levels of digital noise.
The new camera system got us so excited that we just couldn't wait to see what it's capable of. Unfortunately, the conditions at the launch event were far from proper for testing the camera out.
Luckily, we found a camera shootout by the guys over at CNET Asia and they had the HTC One in the comfort of their office for a short while. They were quick to pit it against the iPhone 5 in several lighting conditions and published the full-res test samples.
Since we know comparing image quality of full-size camera samples of drastically different resolution is a daunting task we decided to fill in by offering you our expert comments along with some nice 100% crops that we've made, which should hopefully make comparing easier for you.
Unfortunately, despite the efforts of our colleagues, the source files were not best suited for the task. When making comparison like such, you would ideally try and achieve the same framing and exposure across the devices to get really comparable results. We were forced to disqualify one of the comparison scenes (the nice macro shot of flower, which you can see in the source link) as it was shot from way closer with the HTC One, giving it a dishonest advantage.
But still, we were as curious as you and we set out to compare the available photos as best as we can. We've tried to equalize the exposures where possible and we came up with some nice side-by-side crops for you to compare. What we are looking for to compare here is resolved detail and digital noise.
Both phones at 8MP
Since both phones shoot in different resolutions, for the first round of comparisons, we upsized the HTC One samples to 8MP (with generous sharpening afterwards) so as to see whether it's able to resolve as much detail as a regular 8MP camera. The performance here would be important if say, you would like to print your photos in large paper sizes.
When upsized to 8MP, the HTC One amazingly holds its own and resolves almost the same level of detail as the iPhone 5 in the low light studio shot. Unfortunately, this is no longer the case on the rest of the shots, where the light is better.
In better light the iPhone 5 has a clear advantage, even though, its noise suppression routine does have some sort if an issue with the grass. It kinda smears the detail in the grassy areas, but that's more of a factory setup issue than a deficiency of the camera module itself. You can see the clear advantage in the foliage. The other two crops show a further advantage to the iPhone 5.
CROPS: iPhone 5 (native 8MP) vs. HTC One (upsized to 8MP)
Below you can see the full resolution shots, which we used for the crops above.
Apple iPhone 5 (native 8MP)
HTC One (upsized to 8MP)
Downsized for sharing
Then we figured that many people don't print their photos but only share them online. On most websites the photos get downsized anyway so the maximum resolution doesn't matter that much. So we went this route, too. We downsized the originals from the iPhone and the HTC One down to 1500px horizontal resolution, which is about 1.6MP. Facebook can surely handle those sizes, we checked.
It would be wrong to think that the process of downsizing would be only to the HTC One advantage. Downsizing lowers the perceivable digital noise, so the iPhone's photos benefit from that operation just as well.
Downsizing the photos of both cameraphones levels out the playing field a bit better. Unfortunately, the iPhone 5 mostly retains its superiority in resolved detail even when you downsize all samples to 1.6MP. The outdoor scene with the grass is the only scenario where it loses to the HTC One and that's mainly due to the noise suppression, which kicks in and smears the grassy patches. For the rest of this specific scene, the both phones seem to resolve the same amount of detail.
CROPS: iPhone 5 (downsized to 1.6MP) vs. HTC One (downsized to 1.6MP)
Below you can see the full resolution shots, which we used for the crops above.
Apple iPhone 5 (downsized to 1.6MP)
HTC One (downsized to 1.6MP)
Conclusion
Overall, we were a bit disappointed that we didn't see the promised spectacular improvement from the newly developed camera system of the HTC One. Sure it equaled the iPhone 5 in one or two cases, which is great having in mind it's half the resolution, but most of the time the results were of lower quality.
We don't mean to say the HTC One takes bad pictures - it's just on the contrary, they are quite good and we bet the optical image stabilization will help it take much better photos in low light when handheld as compared to most other smartphones.
But is it a worthy camera for an expensive flagship phone in 2013? We are not so sure - don't forget that a phone with a good 13MP camera will be in an even more advantageous position than the 8MP iPhone 5. And we are yet to see many of those 13MP shooters come out in 2013.
We can't help but feel that HTC is a year late to the market with this type of camera sensor. Sure, high megapixels are not all, but having the biggest pixels around is not enough either.
Thanks for sending this shootout our way, Dane!
Source : http://www.gsmarena.com/htc_one_vs_iphone_5_camera_shootout_surfaces_we_compare-news-5590.php
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