HTC M9 Camera Discussion-Show off your pictures!

Word is the camera isn't that great.

Another camera gripe: Regrettably, my initial impression of this camera is not a positive one. Image noise is present in most of my pictures, and low-light photography is basically a disaster. I was reminded of BlackBerry’s consistently inadequate cameras in the devices that preceded the Passport. Like them, the HTC One M9 lacks optical image stabilization, which the company justifies on account of physical space constraints. The image sensor also appears to be an odd size as the "regular" image ratio is 10:7, and there’s no 4:3 option to be found.

I can't remember when I last took a 4:3 image, so that doesn't bother me (I mainly use SLRs so regard 3:2 as "normal", and 10:7 is closer to that than 4:3).

Yeah, I've seen some of the shots, but it's not unusual for image quality to be improved by updates after release, never mind a pre-release device, so this is somewhere where I'll wait for the release devices before drawing any verdict (and will want to know what settings were used too).

The real test will be what you can do with raw, but most owners won't go that far - someone will though, and I'll be eager to see what can be done there.

We go through this every year.

These idiots just have to click bait their way in with an unfinished product, declare it's crap or controversial and the meme sticks for the lifetime of the phone regardless of reality.

I refuse to look at any more prerelease, preproduction device photos ever again.

It's been a total, complete, and absolute waste of my time every time with every brand and every model.

And I'm not looking now.

Look for pro features coming in a future update. It's not going to be what you're reading about now.

That's all I'm going to say at this time.

HTC made some pretty stupid decisions this time around. The camera was pretty much the one area that they needed to hit out the park this go around given that it was virtually the only thing most reviewers knocked the M8 for. I can see them going for incremental upgrades in all other areas, but if I was on the team behind this phone, there is no way I would have let anyone have it without the cam being near ready for the market. Also, how could they not include OIS? That's baffling.

And there's the problem, right there.

One guy taking it with a grain of salt because it's prerelease and another deciding it's a problem based on the publications.

Everyone asked for megapixels and that's what they delivered.

I honestly am not impressed by any of the high MP phone cameras because they exacerbate the biggest problem going - insane levels of jpeg compression, and that's what HTC has been among the worst at.

I agree that OIS would have been a welcome improvement, however, as a point of reference, the OIS in the M7 and LG G2 (same generation) is far better than in last year's LG G3. So there's OIS and there's OIS.

With this processor, it could be added in software later (quite easily) using the gyroscope that's already there and you wouldn't notice a speed difference at all.

So thanks, I'm not going to waste time looking at any prerelease snaps.

I seem to recall that HTC almost always has a system update within the first month after release - and also as I recall, that's going to include a camera update.

But by then, the clickbait articles will have already updated with the new "truth" because it's final (not first month fixes that they *all* do), shot mostly by editors that can't take pictures anyway and that's going to be the Internet Reality of the camera for the life of the phone, no matter what.

I'll wait patiently and enjoy what the early adopters post here, both as snapshots and as more serious photo efforts before deciding anything.

The annual HTC, LG, and Samsung picture threads here very often show some really great photos, especially for a cell phone.

Mostly because they're taken by people with real software, after they've learned their cameras, and who care about the subjects they're shooting.

Give me that over the silly e-rag announcement and release horse-race, click-bait "shoot outs" any day of the week and twice on Sunday!

PS - HTC was still taking user feedback until quite recently on the camera. No way that feedback was incorporated as improvements by MWC.

I had to look at the Samsung shots, couldn't help it on my Phandroid spam control rounds.

http://phandroid.com/2015/03/02/galaxy-s6-vs-iphone-6-camera-comparison/

Lest anyone think that I'm being an HTC fanboy, my same defense applies for Samsung as well.

Not final software.

Meaningless comparison is meaningless.

Thanks for your patience, I won't belabor the point further.

Hadron said:

Many of the reviewers have commented that they were told that the camera software was not final. It's therefore likely that the others were too, in which case it would be very poor journalism not to mention this.

I've also read that the S6 camera uses exactly the same sensor as the Note 4, so Samsung should have plenty of experience with that one by now.

Click to expand...

I'm saying HTC either knew the phone would take bad pictures or had no clue. If they knew, hence the "we haven't finalized the software?" They know software wont fix crappy pictures. How is that possible when thousands of phones will be on sale in a matter of weeks? Its not like lag on a Moto 360 that was resolved after some major software updates.

Well as the topic of the thread is pictures, here are a few samples from a non-final phone by someone who seems to know a bit more about using a phone camera than many of the reviewers out there:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/jpenico/sets/72157650671608427/with/16509814800/

Personally I wish he'd dialled the sharpening down (which with HTC I believe dials down the noise suppression too) - that would let us play a bit with processing ourselves and see a bit more of what's possible with software. But colour and dynamic range don't seem bad for a phone camera, and the details don't seem half as bad as some of the stuff that's been posted either.

For a phone them pictures look fine to me. Far as I'm concerned digital cameras suck any way.

Closed until pictures show up.

These look pretty good, then again I'm use to crappy Nexus cameras

From what I've seen in fair comparisons. As far as pictures go, the M9 is not nearly as bad as was claimed, but it's still not up to par as far as the current crop of flagships. Video is another story. From what I've seen it's terrible. The cam seems to constantly try to refocus, so you just see it going from blurry to clear over and over throughout a video. It basically makes all you videos worthless.

WuBoy said:

From what I've seen in fair comparisons. As far as pictures go, the M9 is not nearly as bad as was claimed, but it's still not up to par as far as the current crop of flagships. Video is another story. From what I've seen it's terrible. The cam seems to constantly try to refocus, so you just see it going from blurry to clear over and over throughout a video. It basically makes all you videos worthless.

Click to expand...

Agreed that it doesn't seem as bad as was made out, not nearly as bad tbh.

Incidentally, my Z1 did the refocus thing when I used HDR video for a while. A software update fixed that though, so hopefully it can be fixed here too.

On another forum a rather knowledgeable photographer has the M9 and suggests capping the ISO at 400 and setting the sharpness down - 1.5 and claims the results are very good.

SolApathy said:

Again, just point and shoot, clear skies. A little blown out, but I have not done any personalized settings with the camera at all.

For those that don't know, make sure you open the pictures and click on the View attachment 84967 button highlighted in yellow in the top right corner when expanding images in order to see the full picture

View attachment 84964 View attachment 84965 View attachment 84966


Overall, very impressed with the camera, and at the same time disappointed with the reporters that gave it such a poor rating. It's hard to take a bad picture with this camera. Granted it's not the best camera...


Here are 2 low light pictures from my basement of a really old hand carved chest. One with the rear facing camera, one with the UP camera. Excuse the crooked pic, it's dark and well the chest didn't like taking a selfie.

This was a hard pic with all the detail and the low light.

Main camera: ----------- Front UP4 camera
View attachment 84969 View attachment 84970



You can definitely see how superior the UP4 is in low light situations. Rear camera has a lot of noise in the shadows- I am impressed. Once I start tweaking my settings I expect to take some amazing photos.

Click to expand...

Can I suggest taking some pics in a low lit area with other lights around? In some pics I've seen from other reviewers there was a lot of lens flaring. It was pretty bad.

The Front and Main cam comparison is pretty interesting though. If you can figure out how to consistently take pics of things with the Front cam despite not actually having a viewfinder, a lot of the problems might be solved.

Looks promising.. Keep the pictures coming!Ready to upgrade from the M8 in July.

I am becoming convinced that any challenges that this phone has with photos is software related and not hardware related. There are some pretty good threads developing in various forums that talk about drastically better results that can be achieved through manual settings of the camera vs the fully automatic mode. I am duplicating that time and time again. The most important setting appears to be limiting ISO to 200 if at all possible. Auto ISO is just ridiculous on this phone right now. The other manual setting is knocking down sharpness 1.5. Here is what you get when you do that. The first photo is fully automatic and the second photo is optimizing manual settings.