HTC One & The Future of Camera Phones

So HTC announced the One and it will likely be a not-terrible phone.

There are all sorts of quirks that make it likely not-terrible, but its camera is the most interesting thing that makes it not-terrible. The sensor only has 4MP (a little more pixels than 1080p), but the sensor is about as big as any other camera phone sensor. So it has larger pixels that let more light in and are generally more awesome.

Do you guys think the Megapixel Race might finally be ending or will shallow ignorant customers give HTC the shaft because four is a low number?

 

how many htc ones will save htc

 

Also, considering how stupid most smartphone users are, yes, they will ditch HTC for having "only 4MPs". People are stupid.

 

Great phone. Do want.

 

motorola phone will be better anyways~~

 

As an amateur photographer, I wouldn't want a 4 MP camera. My dream phone is the Nokia 808 (41 MPs as far as I am told).

 

Fricken bitches, if they want to take photos they should buy a god damn Nikon.

 

It only takes like 7mp photos or something. Of you're looking to blow up your smart phone images, that isn't the phone to get. Actually that is never the phone to get because it still runs Symbian.

 

I certainly hope that the smartphone market will go in the direction for "bigger" pixels (e.g. bigger sensors). I also like that it stays at a 4.7 inch display and slows down the race for even bigger phones every year.

What i don't get is why the HTC one looks so similar to the new Blackberry. Do they only have one designer in China that makes smartphones or what?

 

It's called oversampling. It takes photos at 41MP (or 38, idk why they publicise it as 41) and then generally speaking, 95% of the time you'll downsize it to 8MP. That 8MP photo will probably beat most compact cameras, and will at least get a lot closer to DSLRs than any other phone or most compact cameras. I've used the 808, it's really incredible what it can do.

But like you said, it's on Symbian, so I wouldn't get it. However, it's fairly assured that a Windows Phone 8 High-MP Pureview camera is coming from Nokia this year, so (Lawliet) I'd just wait for that.

As for the HTC phone, I don't really see the point. Sure the sensor is bigger, lets in more light etc, but they're a bit slow. The Lumia 920 already does this without sacrificing MP. I'm sure that when this phone comes out, they'll run comparisons. But the low-light performance of the Lumia 920 already blows every other phone out of the water. To be honest, the camera beats nearly every other phone camera in every single aspect. So the increased sensor size of the HTC One isn't really worth the loss of resolution. But I guess I have to wait for comparison shots. Honestly, Nokia have fucked up a lot over the last few years, and some people will still argue that they've run themselves into a dead end with WP8, but as far as cameras on phones go, Nokia is still at the forefront of that, leaving pretty much everyone else in their wake.

Also, 8MP is a pretty nice size. It takes photos that will fit nicely on my 2560x1600 screen with room to crop. My old Nokia N95 8GB took 5MP photos, and that took photos that literally just fit onto the screen without any stretching. Any less than 5MP and you're going to start having to stretch. But times are moving on and we're looking at "4K" TVs, which will be 3840 x 2160, meaning even 8MP is going to require stretching. The next generation of camera phones that aren't retarded will probably sit around 12-13MP. Assuming 4K is probably not going to get replaced seriously for at least another decade, I don't think it really needs to go any higher than 12-13MP.

 

Whats that Trickster? Lumia 920 you say?
Anyhow... Phones don't need camera's except for facebook, which is shit.

 

YES, the Lumia 920, available now for just $99 from your nearest outlet. Call now to get the bonus offer of a free WIRELESS-CHARGER, available only to the first 30 callers.

But seriously, the camera is fucking awesome for a phone.

 

What is the point of a wireless charger? I don't understand, they sent me one with my (lowly, crappy, soon to be on ebay because it has no keyboard and I am not a nub) Lumia 820. Like, if I can place it on a wireless charger, I can plug it in.

I am, admittedly, a very lazy person - but it is not even like it does away with wires, you still need a wire to the wireless charger... which is RIGHT NEXT TO THE PHONE. It's right there, I could have plugged that in. Call me when they build them into the pavement. Worst technology ever.

 

I thought for a while that it was pointless, but because I was paying for it with my expenses, I just got one anyway. Turns out it's pretty awesome. It's not that easy to describe, but the ease of just dropping your phone down, and picking it up whenever. There's no "I have to go put my phone on charge". I just drop it down on my desk whenever, then pick it up when I want to use it. It's always charging.

Unrelated (I think this is probably a bug), but the battery seems to drain about 10x faster when I've charged it via USB.

 

The 920 has great low light performance because its ois lets it decrease shutter speed. Hardware ois isn't exactly something you can just fit into a phone, which is one of the reasons the 920 is rather chunky. Similarly the 808 has a massive sensor and a bunch of other shit. It truly is impressive, but that camera takes up a lot of space.

Htc isn't willing to compromise a ton of precious room just to put in a more camera hardware. Their sensor isn't really that big, but their pixels are. While it's impossible to accurately judge the camera quality of an unreleased phone, I think htc is improving camera quality in the best way that they can without dedicating too much hardware to the camera. More stuff means more power to run it, which means more heat to be dissipated and bigger batteries.

4k won't be a camera feature for the foreseeable future, so htc really did pick a good res. Even when displays get out of the multi thousand dollar range, cameras won't be able to collect 4k images for a while longer. The isp has to be have the bandwidth to deal with all of those pixels. Remember the shitty wp7 devices that were stuck on those old Snapdragons? Those phones were limited to 720p because the isp couldn't handle anything more, not because of the camera.

Edit, holy shit was I wrong. The htc one has ois. Let's hope battery life isn't completely molested because that screen isn't doing a damn bit of good for the device.

 

I think you're mistaken a bit on resolutions. If you wanted to be exact, 4K is the equivalent of 8.3 to 8.9MP (16:9 to 16:10 - video), or 12.8MP for 4 (photos). You generally want a bit of room for cropping, so 13MP would be enough. There's already phones in the pipeline with 12-13MP. In terms of photographic quality, you'll see 4K this year, probably on the GS4. It was already on the cancelled HTC Butterfly J, and a couple of Japanese phones (Domoco Arrow X10 or something) have had it for over a year.

Given that video tends to lag behind by about half of camera size, it only really needs to jump from 12-13MP to 16-18MP (more than possible in the next 2 years) to properly achieve 4k recording possibility. In the same time as that, SSDs will have come on enough to have the capacity there. Also remember that video tends to be recorded in 16:9 or 16:10, meaning a decent percentage less is required. It's more than possible.

And as for the size of the hardware, whilst the 808 is certainly bigger due to the camera, most of the Lumia 920's bulk comes from the wireless charging coils. The phone could have been a lot thinner without that. Afaik, there's a lighter, slimmer version of the 920 coming out this year at some point, though it might be a straight upgraded phone called the 930, but there's no concrete info yet.

 

4k is a video term. You don't say, "I took a 4k photo" for the same reason you don't say, "I took a 720p photo."

And why in the world would you need anything more than ~13mp for 4k video? I get that sensors use square-ish aspect ratios because they are ultimately circular, but I don't understand why you need extra pixels in your sensor.

And my goodness boy, what is this poppycock about ssds? Are you suggesting that we're going to see ssds in phones? At the present, their controllers and dram suck down way too much power for a phone. Although you have a good point. eMMC controllers are going to have to improve before we can write 4k video to flash fast enough.

I still don't get how this is relevant. 4k video is years away.

 

SSD is just another word(s) for flash memory, and that all phones have used flash memory since pretty much the first iPhone, if not earlier. It's no different to a pen-drive (I think you guys call them flash drives or some shit). What I meant was, as SSD development (i.e. flash drives for PCs) comes on, it'll also come on for phones. It's just Moore's law.

4k, 1080p, etc, they're all just resolutions at the end of the day, and a video is just a certain amount of photos per second. I'm just interchanging the terminology to show the link. Video tends to behind photos in size. My phone can take 8 MP photos, but it can't record at that quality. Instead, it (along with every other phone) records at 1080p, which is about 2 million pixels. And define "years away". There will be PC monitors at a reasonable price, able to display in 4K within a year.

 

If you want to define an SSD as a storage device that uses some kind of flash, then that's cool as long as you're clear about it. The rest of the world has a different definition.

This is another one of those, "I get what you mean, but I'm a pedantic douchebag" situations. You aren't incorrect, but you probably shouldn't use video resolutions in that way for the same reason that I shouldn't say that my car has 372,850 watts and 475 newton-meters of torque at 530 rad/s.

That's assuming that the megapixel race continues (and ffs, we should hope it doesn't). And even then, your trend isn't that convincing. I'll take a look at the ratio of still MP to video MP in the camera of the iPhone. I'm just using it as a good proxy for typical smartphone cameras just because it gets refreshed every year about the same time. There are many Android phones with identical camera resolutions that are released in that calendar year.



Surprise, surprise, it's exponential, like most things in life. But most definitely, it is not constant, not even close.

I wish that was true. Shit is gonna be pricy, bro. 4K TVs are into the ten thousands now.

 

A solid state drive is a flash drive. I don't get why you're being so autistic over this.

I'm trying to make a comparison between video and photos. Without writing out resolutions repeatedly (which means nothing to a whole lot of people), it's easier to just use terminology people are used to. If this was a debate over Steam in which it was you and I, then sure, I'd use raw resolution. But we aren't the only people on these forums, so I try to present things as clearly as I can. Same goes for the SSD point above. It's just a case of using the terminology which gets the point across easiest.

None of this has anything to do with my argument, you're just trying to direct things towards my (arguably poor) use of mainstream terminology. You've pretty much avoided the original argument.

I'm sorry, what? Your graph isn't even a reply to what I've said (like the vast majority of your argument). Not to mention that trying to call a pattern off a non-linear graph based on 4 points is laughable. Maybe you suck at literacy, maybe I suck at getting my point across, maybe it's a bit of both. So I'll restate the original point before the previous 3000 posts.

Your argument is that cameras have got as high MP as they're going to get (without adding extra bulk to the camera), due to not needing to go higher. My argument (which is already partially proven given there are 12-13MP phones coming out this year) is that the MP race will continue until VIDEO is at a point where it can record in 4K. 4K (in 16:9 or 16:10) is around 8-9 million pixels. Now, thanks to your wonderful graph, we could arguably say it's more than possible the ratio between video and photo will fall. Sadly, this isn't true. Photo resolution will continue to rise, but you can be fairly assured that video resolution is going to stick at 1080p until it's possible for it to jump to 4K, which is 2160P. I doubt they'll stop at 1440p along the way, given it seems that 1440p is getting skipped altogether.

Your counter-argument is that this is bullshit because 4K is a long way off, and would thus not be supported by phones until way into the future, when we all have flying cars and shit . My counter-argument is: no it isn't. Sharp and Panasonic are both releasing non-stupid sized (<50 inch) 4K monitors this year, 32 and 20 inch respectively. I know that the Sharp one is expected to have a price of around $5000. That's down on 10x that the previous year, if not more.

I don't even know what we're arguing any more Spartacus.