Gadgetory

isn't it frustrating when you're watching a phone review and when the reviewer gets to the camera section all day poster a couple of terrible shots while writing that camera off because it's not on their favorite phone let's do something about this we live in an age where the only camera a person might own is the one bolted to the back of their phone so we're giving it the same attention we might give a standalone camera there's more smartphone photography than just ultra pickles and selfies shooting in real-world conditions were going to cover color saturation exposure optics image stabilization bulk a low-light focusing video and any other fun features the manufacturer might have packed on I'm Juan Carlos bag now for pocket now and here's our real camera review of the HTC ten buckle up folks we have a lot of ground to cover and I'm gonna move pretty quick first a little housekeeping the HTC ten is utilizing a one over 2.3 inch 12 megapixel image sensor with a native 4 by 3 aspect ratio the lens has a wide 26 millimeter equivalent field of view and a fast F 1.8 aperture paired with optical image stabilization and laser focus assistance I shot samples at full res and this video is being uploaded at UHD resolution to match the highest quality output from the camera any adjustments made to the images here will be detailed in the upper left corner of the frame we held off on this review to check out the differences in the newest software update at the time this review was produced the HTC 10 was still available for pre-order but hadn't yet started shipping right off the bat early criticisms pointed to washed out images where we wanted to see a bit more contrast and saturation applied to photos and this new camera update seems to be addressing many of those concerns blues and greens are well represented Browns and earth tones avoids shifting into orangish territory and bright light warmer colors like yellows are well captured and even though the saturation has been bumped up we do a respectable job of preventing clipped details in bright parts of these pedals now Reds are always difficult for digital sensors to expose for properly the 10 manages to retain fine detail but the JPEG processing here is taking a bit of a guess as to what this color should look like and looking at some blossoms in bright light the reds and Pink's here are sizzling we lose a little more detail as this pushes more magenta than these flowers really look though this is a pretty common issue across most cameras white objects in direct Sun are extremely hard to meter for and shooting in auto the 10 Clips this white flower pretty bad there's not much info left to recover here in high contrast situations the 10 is able to hold on to info and shadows without completely blowing out the texture of the wall opening up the raw image we can easily pull more info out of this rough exterior now purposely overexposing a shot by two stops as the camera meters we can't quite recover the shot by dialing back exposure and post but these RAW files handily survive some fairly extreme edits for a phone camera average JPEG sizes are between two and five megabytes per image RAW files are close to 24 megabytes per exposures so saving both means eating up close to 30 megabytes per shot definitely a situation where photography heavy users will probably want to invest in a memory card now the 10 doesn't have the best minimum focusing distance for macro fans unfortunately locking somewhere around 4 inches from the lens it's more than an inch off from competitors like the galaxy s7 and LG g5 a close-up shots will look nice but getting closer would have been appreciated as there's a little less resolution to play with for cropping and closed and the sensor paired with an F 1.8 aperture gives us a really pleasantly shallow depth-of-field backgrounds blur nicely objects behind your subject will be less distracting and we get fun little bouquet balls on reflections or light filtering through leaves adding lasers to this focusing system helps quite a bit in improving accuracy now this is not the fastest system we've tested but miss focus situations are rare until you push into macro territory or extreme low-light and this camera does a very good job in landing accurate white balance we get really warm afternoon light in Los Angeles and before the update colors were washed out but happily now we're seeing a bit more of the glow we would want to see from a juicy JPEG a shaded shots also avoid the bluish over corrections we might see on some competitors I'm checking out high dynamic range our early testing on HDR photos was disappointing but playing with a few more setups I have to change my tune the HTC 10 is doing a better job than most androids and reining in highlights all too often HDR photos are just shadow brightening modes remember the white flour with blown out highlights the TENS HDR mode manages to pull back some of that clipping this isn't as consistent a performer as Apple's HDR processing and there are plenty of situations where it still blows out the shot but I'm very happy to see some attempt made at controlling brightness for shooting ultra wide panorama performance here is mid-pack stitching performance has improved from the last update but we still see a few more stitching failures or errors than I would like on busy setups like the street scene and the overall exposure tends to favor the darkest part of your scan so the whole finished shot often washes out or feels too bright I'm not a huge fan of selfies but adding optical image stabilization to the front shooter makes the front camera a more competitive option indoor shots come out a little brighter and a little clearer and video is much improved over most of the CSEC results competitors produce most phones exposed a touch brighter than I think they need to at night and the 10 is no exception on well-lit street scenes happily this doesn't result in excessive degradation due to noise reduction those dialing back the exposure touch brings in a nicely balanced shot with less fine detail smearing when shooting in darker locations like our creepy tunnel this JPEG rendering can't contain the high ISO noise and the result is both grainy er and smudgy err a minor exposure correction helps a little to alleviate that issue on this shot we can also easily see that the lens HTC is using is quite nice for such a wide field of view and a large aperture we're only seeing minor fringing in aberration moving to our creepy gate HTC's camera app is focused on finding the true white of this gate almost completely ignoring the ugly yellow orange security lighting in the scene also peeking in on the raw file in producing a brighter jpg we're blurring out a lot of detail in this gate a situation where a little less brightness and a little more contrast might help pull more detail out of the shot our walkway test shows off great color accuracy between these two bulbs and we've got very good dynamic range here as the hot spots under each lamp are fairly well contained looking at some small pink flowers lit by a porch lamp even with image stabilization the HTC has difficulty landing a sharp image our best single exposure of five handheld shots is still fairly blurry in almost no light the 10 is able to find this flower on full auto which is impressive but tapping on the screen to focus instantly confuses the camera and focus never recovers until we go back to full auto a situation where the lg laser focusing system still excels throwing the flash lands really well exposed shots with very good color in dim indoor lighting situations there seems to be a two-stage action which helps fill in shadowed and darker objects which might be otherwise underexposed we have a full selection of manual options to play with white balance exposure compensation ISO shutter speed and manual focus these are very helpful for folks looking to dial in the specific settings needed for a photo these sliders can be difficult to read in daylight however is this white text is really small and we don't have any other metering info like a histogram to help inform our shots this is compounded when shooting videos we have tiny text counting down from 6 minutes which is the limit for UHD video it's an unfamiliar brain twist to be told how much time you have remaining as opposed to how long you've been shooting also the maximum shutter we can play with is only 2 seconds so folks who enjoy long exposure shots might be disappointed if this app is really well organized and happily adjusting any menu setting HTC never completely removes you from your composition window while making an adjustment you still have some relationship to what you're trying to shoot moving the video we're saving a very high quality file here around a 60 megabit per second bit rate which can eat up storage pretty quickly it's over 400 megabytes per minute of video a happily we move to spot metering when shooting video back to that white flower instead of trying to expose for the background the 10 adjusts brightness for the exact spot I focus on this can make night shots a little tricky sometimes but more often than not you'll probably want the object you focus on to be properly exposed for while we get a nice high-quality UHD mode at 30 frames per second we don't get a 60 frame per second mode for 1080p video which is disappointing for those who want to capture crisp action looking at the zoom HTC restricts the range here a bit more than other manufacturers have this reduces the amount of reach but we aren't blowing up the image as much and it preserves video quality a little bit better one of the trade-offs of a lower resolution sensor but the 10 nicely balances the need to against saving a video you might actually want to look at on video we can also take a closer look at image stabilization and it's just okay there's a very narrow range of correction at play here when trying to hold this still as possible we see subtle shifts to rein in slight hand shake but introducing any movement into the shot like walking easily overpowers the amount of Correction this lens can provide while competing manufacturers can sometimes be accused of producing jello II or seasick inducing video HCC seems to have swung far in the opposite direction this might be a contributing factor in some of the poor low-light photography we encountered examining audio playback on an HTC is always a joy and listening to the audio recorded on an HTC is always excellent opening up the mkv files produced here we see the HTC is storing F lack lossless audio paired with terrific microphones and even-handed noise reduction filtering we have best-in-class performance for an Android and one of the closest competitors we've ever heard against Lumia smartphones onto an exposure test moving from dark to bright and back the ten blooms nicely as the scene gets brighter but white balance is extremely slow to respond to changing light conditions the transitions are very abrupt moving back to a darker part of the frame and the camera in adjusting these conditions seems to be dropping a few frames during this lateral pan post update low-light video still pushes a touch brighter than it might need to and this results in a bit more noise than we'd like to see but overall we get a good image out of this phone reflections and fringing are easier to see while the camera is moving but they aren't substantially different from other large aperture phone cameras and looking at slow motion video it's a fun feature to play with though output doesn't quite reach the quality or the smoothness of competitors like the iPhone or galaxy s7 we seem to be locked in at a 120 frames per second 720p or we might be limited to only a 4x speed reduction but we can't find any options for altering this mode to go slower so let's wrap this up where does that leave us with the camera on the HTC 10 this phone is still a work in progress but this recent update improved on many of the criticisms we had with the camera output early on this is a very good camera and competes well against other phones in this tier for covering photography and UHD video HTC's ethic of getting back to basics delivers something more competitive than what we've seen from the last two generations of HTC flagships the core experience is well in place and where we lose out are on some of the fun features and controls like 60 frames per second video it's rare that we see manufacturers add significantly new features or options to their devices after launch but at least here following the early updates HTC is in a far improved position for satisfying folks who want a solid camera on their phone even if nothing major changes from this point on HTC is in much better shape as always thanks so much for watching be sure to subscribe to this channel for our full coverage of the HTC 10 and hit that thumbs up button for a little your positive reinforcement for pocket now I'm Juan Carlos bag now you can catch me on Twitter and Instagram is some gadget guy and I will catch you all on the next review you