HTC introduced its “Ultra Pixel” camera last year, which was supposed to give good low light performance but the camera failed to impress us and many others. This time HTC has made several improvements with its new Ultra pixel camera in HTC One M8. This is not one of the best camera that we have seen in high end devices, but is a significant enhancement and will allow you to have loads of amateur photography fun.
HTC One M8 (Hands on Review) employs one extra camera sensor at the back, which acts as a depth of field sensor to capture more than 2D images. The lytro camera like feature lets you refocus all clicked images – a feature which HTC uses to add myriad of effects. There are four software features which take advantage of the data captured from the depth of field sensor (HTC has not given any technical details about this sensor)
The Ufocus editing mode lets you blur the background or foreground on all clicked images. HTC One M8 doesn’t have to capture a series of photographs for this unlike ‘refocus app’ in Lumia 1520 and thus is faster to operate. This artistic effect is known as Bokeh effect.
The refocus feature is also present in all other flagship phones like Samsung Galaxy S5, LG G Pro 2 and Xperia Z2, but HTC’s implementation is better. However, you can’t share it on facebook and allow your friends to refocus like the Nokia Refocus.
The Foreground effect lets you add effects other than blur effects to better highlight the objects in the foreground as is evident from the images below.
Seasons let you put autumn leaves, snowflakes and other seasonal stuff in your shots. This is not unheard off feature, but is fun to play with. You can later save the effects as videos or image and share it with your friends.
The Dimension plus helps you slightly tilt the angle of images by capturing the data from both sensors. The effect is far from perfect and but still helps you to recompose your shot to a small extent. Take a look at the what this effect can do in the images below
The copy and paste function uses the camera’s ability to recognize depth and allows you to copy a person from one image and paste it into another, without going through the trouble of editing it on your PC.
HTC has improved its ultra pixel camera by using a new algorithm and similar improvement is also possible for these post click digital processing features. The true tone dual LED flash helps to add better white balance to low light photography. The optical image stabilization has been replaced with digital image stabilization and we will have to test it to know if it works as good. The camera can focus in about 0.3 second, which matches Samsung Galaxy S5’s “fastest claim”.
