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Did you hear about the HTC One’s fancy new “UltraPixel Camera”? HTC touts the camera as an end to the “megapixel wars.” UltraPixels! Revolution! And, yes, the technology sounds very promising, but, uh, wait a second, what is an UltraPixel anyway?
HTC’s new phone only has a 4-megapixel camera, and that could lead people to think it’s inferior to the (roughly) 8-megapixel cameras on competing phones like the Nokia Lumia 920 and iPhone 5. Indeed, huge megapixels counts have long been used to trick customers into thinking that one camera is more sophisticated than another. The solution? Rewrite the language? Or maybe just confuse people more with another meaningless term.
HTC really wants you to know that its megapixels are BIGGER than the megapixels on competing cameras. That’s why they’re so ULTRA, get it? Fewer pixels on an identical surface area means the pixels are bigger. Both the HTC One and Lumia 920 have a 1/3-inch sensor, but the 920 has 8.7-megapixels compared to the HTC One’s 4MP. That’s why the HTC One has larger 2-micrometers pixels whereas the 920 only has 1.4-micrometer pixels.
Size matters. Image sensors are covered in photodiodes, which convert light into electricity, which is processed and recorded as data. Each pixel in your photo represents one photosite on the sensor.
When you take a picture, the camera’s shutter flies open for a fraction of a second letting photons pour in. Bigger photosites can capture more photons, and thus, capture more data. The difference is especially pronounced in conditions where the light sucks.
More data means more quality—to a point. You need enough pixels so that you can view the image at a reasonable size on screens. Think about how ridiculous a 100 x 100 image would look on the 1920 x 1080 on the HTC One’s 1920 x 1080 screen. But then again, most cameras output photos way larger than what most people will ever need. The 4-megapixel camera on the HTC One outputs 2688 x 1520 images, and that’s really dangerously small if you want to crop or edit your images at all, but HTC is gambling that it is good enough for most people. All you’re doing is uploading photos to Facebook and Instagram anyway, right?
The resolution of a camera’s image sensor is only one of many factors that affect image quality. The lens, image processor, autofocus, and metering all have to work well, too. That’s why in our recent smartphone camera battlemodo, five cameras with nearly identical megapixel specs yielded such different results. Sure, the HTC One has an industry-leading (along with the Lumia 920) f/2.0 lens. But other than the favourably large aperture, we don’t know if this camera—for all the hype—is really any good at all.
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It’ll probably turn out to just being some fancy marketing designed to sound impressive to people who don’t understand. HTC always go on about their cameras and yet they’re always the worst.
Sounds like it, a larger sensor in theory sounds better but the larger pixels sounds like more trash for the high street phone shop sales ogres! Can anything other than an htc make use of these bigger pixels?
Weren’t the One X and One S good?
No they were terrible.
Pretty certain nearly every review disagrees with you on that.
I remember comparing my mates one to a GS3 and an iPhone 4 and it was worse than both of them, in fact it’s well known it is pretty much last in the flagship phones from last year.
absolute balls!
This simply isn’t true. The One X camera is excellent
The One X camera was reviewed to be comparable, if not slightly better than the 4S, both on Gizmodo, and TechRadar. Looking at the sample shots, I agree with them.
FINALLY, HTC is the first phone maker to have some sense with phone cameras.
Who needs more than 4 megapickles with a phone anyway? A resolution of 1920×1080 is about 2 megapickles, you’ll be getting double that with 4 megapickles.
pickles*
A bit more info – the area of the 1.4×1.4 um pixel is just less than 2um^2, the area of the 2×2 um pixel is dead on 4 – it’s got just over double the area, so theoretically can collect double (I think Area is directly proportional to intensity collected) the light.
I have to say, though, wouldn’t an approach similar to the Nokia Pureview be more prudent, and, cheaper? I.e. Take an ordinary 8MP chip, and just use 2 pixels for each pixel of actual image collected.
Maybe Nokia have patented this, or HTC have done the maths, and this is indeed better.
I dunno people think anything thicker than a mm these days is too thick lol. Personally I don’t care, using the 808 it’s like 1.5cm thick at the cam area and yet it I don’t notice it.
Did you reply to the wrong person?
PS, if you didn’t, completely agree with you, don’t care about how thick my phone is, my Desire Z was thin enough, and that was a brick!
This actually sounds like a good idea and dare I say, something Apple would of done back in the day when their tech specs/price looked laughable compared, but each component had been tuned perfectly. Anything over 4MP really IS pointless for a phone. So tune up those pixels instead of cramming in more shit ones.
edit: WAS an Apple fanboy but looking forward to ditching them any day now with ideas like this.
Never understood the megapixel race but this is bound to put some people off being 4 megapixels…
They will probably market it as 4 ultra pixels and people will start to snob megapixels no matter how high the number is.
So, this says to me that they’ve just made the sensor bigger (apologies of I’m incorrect)
If I am correct, why not keep it at 8 megapixels, just with a bigger sensor?
Because ultra pixel sounds better than 8 megapixel with bigger sensor?
No, the sensor size remains the same, but the individual pixels are twice as big and there are half as many.
ah i see, i took the diagram at face value
i’m still very skeptical of this though, well, we’ll see when it’s released and real photo’s are taken, not just the sample ones
mp count ALOT when done right like with the 808
yes alot of people just use the camera on their phone for fb which the htc ne will be ok for
but it wont ever be good for editing and cropping to a certain point in the picture etc
Big pixels are good and all, and it might help a little bit, but isn’t cramming 4 million pixels into a 1/3″ sensor going to have pretty much the same light-capturing performance as 8 million pixels on the same 1/3″ sensor?
I mean, bigger pixels can absorb more light, but the same total amount of light is being used to create the image (the area of the 1/3″ sensor), so apart from the tiny pathways between pixels (if any), there won’t be much advantage to this, save for smaller files, right?
One thing to remember is that, if you assume a fixed minimum dead gap between pixels, you have less dead area than with more, smaller pixels. Might sound like a small issue, but it’s actually a serious factor in sensor performance.
Besides that, and I’m not entirely sure of the physics behind it, but larger pixels are still better than averaging over smaller pixels. It’s not so much to do with the amount of light, but the signal-to-noise ratio. SNR may not be linearly related to pixel size; it may improve, say, quadratically.