Let's take a look at the
camera now because this is obviously a standout feature for HTC
or at least they hope it will be. Now it's using the same
ultra pixel technology as the previous HTC One from 2013
with a major change. We now have a dual
camera and dual LEDs there. Now what we
have come to expect from HTC is a very good camera with a fast auto focus
and a kind of feature set which feels solid.
Now the first thing I would say is the autofocus is still
really really exceptional. Obviously the trick here is I'm
quite close to the desk when I'm just doing this but you can see it's very very fast and responsive.
Features wise, this kind of
four dots in a row there brings us into our kind of settings and it's
beautifully kind of laid out with big buttons so that you can quickly hit things.
I like that. Compared to say the
Galaxy S4 camera software this feels nice.
Likewise, all you have to do is touch and you can move between
various settings, including cell feed, dual capture
hello camera, and panoramics.
The only thing that kind of strikes me as not being very nice, listen to this.
Hear that? I don't like that.
That might sound like a nit-pick but it's a really kind of harsh sound.
It doesn't feel like a kind of haptic feedback kind of thing.
It almost feels like a light switch being turned on and off and getting that little
spark. It's not particularly pleasant
I wouldn't say. That's not too bad the kind of wood knock
sound, but that short kind of yeesh, I don't like it particularly.
But if all I'm grumbling about is the sound on one button
fair enough. I think I can probably live with it but
yes, that just grates actually. But anyway once we actually have our kind of
option selected we then can go into our settings down here
and here we have all of the options you could possibly imagine.
So there's our auto and what type of auto, we can have it on auto we can have
nightshot, HDR, sweet panoramic
that's going to be a fun one to try out. Ooops just get back into there.
We've got anti-shake
sorry, I'm just trying to get into the right setting here.
Where's it gone? Right manual, portrait
landscape, wow, there's plenty of them, backlit,
text or macro mode, macro obviously being for close-up
work so those are your kind of your scenes
as it were. There's more known by many cameras you'd use
what's known as scene modes. Let's just pop that back onto auto for a second.
And then what we also have within each of those modes
is the ability to then change camera settings. So you can have the ISO on auto
or ISO up to 1600 which is the max. ISO is how sensitive
the camera is going to be to light. Now in part that kind of doesn't matter so much because we're dealing
with an ultra pixel camera here.
It's light sensitivity is excellent. And then we also have our
exposure compensation, or exposure timings there as well
automatic white balance or select what type of light you are dealing with,
auto white balance is always a funny one. Personally I always find it is better
to tune it to exactly what you're looking for or what you are looking at should I say.
You've then got the obligatory filters. Yes, it wouldn't be a smartphone camera
in 2013 or 14
which doesn't have filters in it. So there we have a wide range of different filters
and these will be real time filters as well so it will actually adjust
this in real time to give you different kind of views and looks, which is quite
nice. I liked this in the previous version of the
HTC One. It was quite nice just to quickly throw on an effect and see how it would change the scene.
We can also then go into this clog here, cog should I say
and you've then got even more options. Continuous shooting
what will actually be used to trigger the camera.
Trigger a picture to be taken, image adjustment, the crops, you can have the grid on,
geotag all your photos and how long will view duration be.
It's a wide range of different features, let's put it that way
and I would say, certainly comparable to Samsung's stuff.
But maybe not quite as fully featured in some respects. But ultimately
the dual camera option is going to be the big decider here.
If you're able to then manipulate and recompose your images
after you've taken them. It's going to be a major plus point. It's going to be really interesting to kind of
see
feature wise how this kind of stacks up to
the Samsung Galaxy S5 as well from its features point of view. But certainly what I've seen here
the speed of the camera
the way the functionality has been laid out. It's really
nicely done. Far far better than that kind of horrible mess we had on the Galaxy S4
where
frankly it was just clunky and taking pictures wasn't particularly fun if you
had to go in and make any changes to the settings.
It seems here that HTC have done a good job at rethinking
how to layer all of that, at times, quite complex set of settings
without cluttering the screen or giving you really small targets to try and hit with your
fingers. I really like this and certainly I think that
you know we'll give this a good test run taking different images and video
and we'll report back on what we see. It's difficult during these kind of
first looks to get much more than a fairly surface view of
how this is going to work in practice. But let's see.
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