This figure refers to the aperture, how big the lens’s light opening is. The lens makes similar moves to ensuring low-light performance too. Heck, it might well even be worse if HTC hasn’t aced the design. In excellent light – such as a bright, sunny day, the HTC One is less likely to show such benefits over a standard mobile phone. This should give the phone far better low light performance than even top-end phone cameras including the iPhone 5 and Samsung Galaxy S3.īetter low-light performance means much less grainy, underexposed images in poor lighting conditions and improved focusing too. HTC says that the larger pixels of the One enable the phone enable it to take in “300 per cent more” light than a standard mobile phone sensor. For spec fans, it’s a 1/3-inch BSI CMOS sensor. The downer is that the sensor itself isn’t all that big – hence why HTC has only managed to fit in 4.3-odd million pixels. To oversimplify matters, the HTC One offers sensor pixels comparable to a “proper” dedicated camera within the space of a mobile phone’s camera array.

They’re roughly the same size as those of a high-end compact like the FujiFilm X20, which produces fantastic images, and costs a pretty penny itself at around £400. They’re roughly double the size of the norm, in fact. Your first assumption may be that a 13-megapixel sensor like that of the Sony Xperia Z would easily outclass the HTC One, but it’s not quite so simple.Īlthough it’s not pixel-packed, the HTC One camera’s pixels are much larger than the smartphone norm. The HTC One uses a single 4.3-megapixel sensor. However, it is not mere marketing nonsense. Megapixel refers to a million pixels, but short of a pixel superhero, UltraPixel doesn’t hold the same resonance. HTC’s “UltraPixel” term marks a disconnection from science – it’s effectively a marketing term. Raw images that result are relatively small in terms of file size – as the megapixel count is so slow – but the HTC One is designed to make the most of every pixel at its disposal. The HTC One’s UltraPixel sensor features much larger pixels than the norm. Using a 4-megapixel sensor, it may not sound at all impressive, but like the PureView camera seen in the Nokia 808 Pureview, there’s some clever stuff going on behind the scenes. Perhaps the most exciting feature of the new flagship HTC One Android phone is its new camera type, which HTC calls UltraPixel.

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