Gadgetory

hey it's Josh regard from Andhra Authority what's going on everybody and every photo and video you're seeing in this camera shootout was taken on the cameras of the HTC One m9 let's start off with some of the better - pretty good results that the HTC One m9 was able to make in my travels to San Francisco and then to the Hollywood sign there are going to be a lot of photos here that you're seeing in the beginning of this video in full broad daylight now these are obviously going to be the most ideal situations for you to use the HTC One m9 as well as other cameras as well but this is definitely where you're going to see some of the best photos that this camera can make from there I should tell you that I'm taking all of these photos at the full resolution at 20 megapixels and as you can see the coloration is quite good it might not be quite as saturated as plenty of the other players in the android game but nonetheless you'll see these photos have a very large size to them and then you'll see the 100 crops that you're already saying for plenty of the photos in here as a companion out on daily drives you'll find that the HTC One m9 is not a hard camera to use especially when you have that interface that swipes up and down from the different modes however certain aspects of the camera app are a little bit fidgety especially when you're trying to trigger things like the HDR mode you have to go through a few different presses in order to even activate it and then do the same number of presses if you want to turn it off for particular photos but the HDR samples are going to come up a little bit later in this video and I'll show you how it sort of mitigates the exposure issues that happens in the camera app but at the same time the HDR mode is maybe a little bit hit-and-miss as well but nonetheless here we are doing the hike on the Hollywood Hills they've got a couple lovely dogs here to take some photos and some videos of and really all of these photos are quite nice definitely usable in all different situations especially in social media this particular photo right here as you'll see in the 100 crop is a little bit blurry and the main reason why is because I had to zoom in in order to get this particular shot of the Griffith Observatory and the same went for this particular shot of the Hollywood sign where i zoomed in using the camera app and then you can see even more grain because that digital zoom doesn't do the photo many favor of course ending this particular segment with a lovely Tesla Model S now without oh is and the pictures you might have to try a few different times in order to get your photo right because the stabilization is not there however you see it the most in videos you have to keep yourself pretty steady in order to get a nice steady and very good video and in plenty of situations where maybe you're going handheld while walking it's not the most ideal situation but now here is where I get into some of those exposure issues that I told you about earlier now since the camera app in the HTC One m9 focuses on spot metering you have to find just the right spot in order to get the exposure that you want in the photo now if you go into a dark area the entire photo starts to get pretty lights and if you go into a light area the whole photo starts to get a little bit dark this is mostly true for situations where you would want to use HDR as you're seeing here in the comparison among different exposures and then like right here the actual HDR shots now the HDR shots do tend to add a little bit more color saturation and it does even out the exposures in particular photos and situations which is really great but it's a mode that you're going to have to fidget to get to in the first place which might not always be the ideal now some of the difference other modes that are available include the panorama shot which here shows a pretty nice view of the urban lights at LACMA in LA and then of course from the hike you can see here that I did have a little bit of trouble in one particular section so the lighting did get a little bit weird moving from left to right or right to left with the panorama can be a bit of a chore the front-facing camera tends to be a highlight of the camera experience because it is of the ultrapixel iteration you now get the full ultra pixel experience on the front facing camera so especially for indoor self-portraits you'll get some pretty nice shots and then of course you have all of the different effects that the HTC One m9 camera app puts in like the face fusion as you can see here the face melding into another one and then going right back you are able to put particle effects on a particular photo and then get a nice tiny little photo of it as you can see right here and finally you are able to put two photos together with a number of different effects in order to meld the two together into one now all of those effects are certainly very fun to use and it is a crux of the camera experience on the HTC One m9 especially the zoe's which do return and give you a nice way of kind of recapping a particular day and you're going to see one at the end of this video unfortunately my main gripe with the HTC One m9 camera as you're going to see as I'm slowly getting into the indoor shot and then later into the low-light shots is that the camera itself in just a chair picture quality is pretty uneven especially when you take away prominent light sources and you get indoors or you get even two shots during the night you tend to see a lot more grain and unfortunately there's a noise reduction that's going on here that really makes all the photos look really smudgy and you're going to see that digression as I slowly get into much lower light situations now from what I can tell the main reason why the HTC One m9 has trouble in low-light shots is because it does two things in typically in these situations it ups the ISO to very high levels which you can already see here adds a lot of grain to photos and then it slows the shutter speed which has a different problem attached to it at slower shutter speeds you have to keep your hands as steady as possible because there's a longer amount of time needed for the camera to bring in all of the light in order to get the proper exposure now in those situations you're going to end up having to take multiple shots and for the most part you're probably going to end up getting somewhat blurry photos because of the slow shutter speed now what that means is that the HTC One m9 camera just happens to be pretty uneven it is able to get some pretty great shots in very prominent life but in even indoor situations the grain just comes out in the noise reduction that the camera app uses in its post-processing really doesn't do much to help the situation and to end this video since you guys liked it so much last time I went ahead and put a lot of foodie pictures at the end of this so you can see how the m9 fares in that particular situation which is really common for a lot of your users ultimately the HTC One m9 is not a bad performer by any means it is a very solid performer in the camera department but unfortunately there's one particular reason why I wouldn't use it all the time and it's because I would prefer that the camera I have on me at all times phone is a really good performer in pretty much any situation that I would throw at it now the HTC One m9 does do some pretty great photos in broad daylight and in high-level light shots and even if the color saturation is a little bit lower you can always bump that up in the settings but once you go to the low-light situations that's when things really take a turn and the noise reduction the post-production and really just the different choices that the HTC One m9 camera makes really don't make for a good low light level shooter many users have confirmed that if you go into the settings you can tweak a number of the toggles in order to get better photos out of this camera but for a out-of-the-box experience you would really help that the phone that you spend a lot of money on will be able to perform the way that you need it to and unfortunately with the HTC One m9 that's just not the experience that I had with it as always give it into Android Authority for even more coverage of the HTC One m9 including the review that you can see right over on the side and also stay tuned for even more from the rest of us here at Android authority because we are your source for all things Android you