Gadgetory

hey what's up guys I'm Kay PhD here and the HTC one looks to be pretty much the best phone of 2013 right now and it's got a pretty awesome feature set to back that up it has a great spec sheet it has an awesome build quality whole bunch of awesome things about it but one feature about it seems to be generating the most buzz that the most people are talking about and that is the camera so this is the ultra pixel explain alright so the traditional smartphone camera resolution is measured in megapixels four megapixel cameras then eight megapixel cameras then 12 and 13 megapixel cameras became the norm so as we see all the specs of other phones like clock speed of the CPU and amount of RAM and all sorts of other things like battery size increase in number we automatically assume that bigger is better with all these specs and the same thing happens to the megapixel count so now we see 12 and 13 megapixel cameras and the average customer just sort of assumes that a 12 megapixel is better than an 8 megapixel when then that's not necessarily true the average consumer making this decision without actually knowing anything else about the camera like the lens or the image processor became known as the megapixel race and that's still kind of seen today but the megapixel count is literally just a resolution it's the resolution of the image that this sensor takes so an 8 megapixel camera sensor will take a 32 64 by 24 48 image which is significantly larger than anything that our TVs or computer monitors can natively show usually our best computer monitors can only show up to maybe 5 megapixels natively so you will only be able to tell the difference between an 8 megapixel and a 13 megapixel if you do some zooming or cropping or printing it on a really large size so HTC has decided to take a risk and not get involved in the megapixel race and instead develop their own technology up til now smart phone sensors and the cameras have stayed about the same size but manufacturers have been cramming more and more pixels into those so we've seen it go from 4 megapixels to 8 like we said to 12 and 13 and even higher and as you cram that many more pixels onto the same size sensor the pixels get significantly smaller and smaller which means you get less and less light pixal when you get less light in the image or at least less light per pixel you're going to see more noise grain and worse low-light performance that's where HTC has decided to switch things up and crime far less pixels on to the sensor they use a four megapixel sensor which means that yes there are far less pixels but those pixels are a lot bigger which means you will get more light and you'll get far less grain and you will get better low-light performance so yes the HTC One is outfitted with a four megapixel camera it takes four megapixel photos very very small photos comparatively speaking but these are huge pixels which is where the ultra pixel name comes from and since it's only a four megapixel sensor HTC has decided not to even talk about the resolution count and completely change it over with ultra pixels and sort of mask that embarrassingly low megapixel count so what's the difference between a 4 megapixel and a 4 ultra pixel camera well nothing really we haven't seen anything HTC said that has confirmed that there is any difference at all I mean they like to talk a lot about their technology but as far as we know maybe smartphone sensors have gotten a tiny bit bigger over the years as we get bigger phones and they get more room in the internals but really the individual pixel size has remained pretty small so now the HTC One while it does have the lowest megapixel count of any smartphone today it also does have by far the largest pixels in any other sensor in any other high-end smartphone so there's a trade-off worth it how does it perform to be honest paired with the F 2.0 lens and the new HTC image processing chip it's actually not a bad performer as you can see the photos that it takes in regular light are pretty average there might not be a whole lot of dynamic range but the photos are pretty good even though they're not quite as sharp as say an 8 or 13 megapixel camera in low-light it is a stellar performer but again we're not sure how many people bother to take photos with their phone in low-light but if you compare it to something like the Nokia Lumia 920 which actually has a massive sensor so it's a high resolution and slightly larger pixels you'll notice that it's it's performing at about the same level these are really high-end cameras in low-light because they let so much light in per pixel on the video side of things 4 megapixels is still significantly more than 1920 by 1080 so there is no sharpness problem with video so it takes pretty decent video but again dynamic range and color reproduction could be a little bit better but that's again the HTC image processing so there is no real problem with it being a four megapixel sensor and that's a good sign overall it's not the best smartphone camera out there even though it is one of the weirdest sounding when you say ultra pixel but overall HTC hasn't really revolutionized anything here they haven't used any sort of crazy proprietary technology and layered sensors and any chronic crazy stuff like that they haven't invented anything new in fact all they've done is decrease the number of pixels and roustabout how big the pixels now are which is one way of looking at marketing they took a risk that happened to be a really good idea and dressed it up under some fancy marketing and coated it with a sweet name and boil up you have the ultra pixel so there you go that's the HTC One and the ultra pixel camera explain hope you guys enjoyed this quick video if you did enjoy it definitely if you were to give a thumbs up below and I have a couple more interesting videos at leasing the explained video series down below so there's a link to a playlist below the like button and if 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