HTC camera guru talks the M8 camera

Not many people are familiar with Symon Whitehorn by name but most people know about the Ultrapixel tech he’s managing at HTC.

The company’s camera guru that stood for the Ultrapixel camera last year is in the spotlight once again, defending this year’s take on the 4 MP flagship camera in an in-depth interview with Vodafone UK. He still stands by the Ultrapixel technology and defends the 4 MP resolution as a more reliable choice in terms of speed. He went on to say that most people will be using their photos on their smartphones or social media and that HTC wanted to make those photos great.

When talking about the 4 MP count he says that it’s not the megapixels that HTC is wedded to but the larger pixels themselves. The other reason is speed and Mr. Whitehorn says that the higher-megapixel sensors on smartphones these days are very slow and have long shutter lag.

The simple answer is: we’re not wedded to a megapixel number, but we focus on large pixels with a low signal noise ratio. That’s what we’re passionate about… We don’t want to choke our ‘image pipe’ with high resolution files that few people are really going to use, just for a spec-sheet number of megapixels.

Moving along Mr. Whitehorn says that for HTC it’s more important to get the picture in difficult conditions. He says that going out and buying a 20 MP sensor off some manufacturer’s hands is way easier than producing the Ultrapixel camera.

Besides which, around 90% of pictures taken on a phone reside in the phone or within social networks that shrink the image size anyway. So for a lot of people, I think it’s more important to get the picture in a difficult condition.

When he addresses the Duo Camera he says it’s the first smart camera in a smart phone. Comparing it to the human eyes he says the Duo Camera is important because it brings precious spacial information that can tell the sensor what the distance between objects is, leading to some nifty effects. He says the technology can go a lot further after HTC releases an SDK for developers to utilize the unique hardware on the HTC One (M8).

Think of it as a smart camera in a smart phone, finally. Up to this point cameras have been relatively dumb. It’s our first foray into ‘information imaging’

Finally, speaking about the criticism over the M8 camera’s overexposing Symon Whitehorn says HTC has tuned the camera to perform better at night but that you can always choose to manually change the exposure settings.

Everyone has a personal preference for photography, different exposure and sharpness levels etc. We at HTC have tuned the camera for 90% of the use cases for mobile photography

Ultimately Mr. Whitehorn urges users to experiment. He says that slightly oversharpened images may look great on an HD phone’s screen but not so much in other use cases.

If you want to put your photos up on your TV or get them printed off, for instance, I would highly recommend adjusting the sharpening settings’ ICR (Infrared Cutfilter Removal), and put the sharpening level down….We know that 90% of people will only ever look at photos on the phone screen, so it’s about getting a good photo for that purpose.

This was just part of the interview. Vodafone UK says it will reveal more soon.

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