HTC Titan camera sample and review

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Johnny in the Neowin forums have given the HTC Titan a quick review. There are many elements of the device he is not impressed with, calling Metro on the massive screen “comical”, but one element he did find laudable was the 8 megapixel camera.

This right here is the Titan’s hidden little gem. A backlit, f 2.2 8MP sensor – which on paper should put it ahead of the iPhone 4S’s much lauded camera hardware. Of course, a lot of 4S’s great picture quality is down to great software too, and I very much doubt HTC’s abilities to match Apple in that regard. I don’t have a 4S to compare to, but how does the Titan compare to all the other Windows Phone devices? AMAZINGLY.

First let’s start with the speed – almost as soon as the camera app is open – the camera is up and ready to take a picture. It’s notably faster than any other Windows Phone device I’ve tried. In about 2 seconds, you can launch the camera app, and have taken a sharp, clear in-focus picture, even indoors. Unlike previous HTC cameras, the indoor performance of this device is amazing. Even without flash, it takes sharp picture with no motion blur or shake visible. There’s noise, but that’s to be expected without flash, indoors, in the dark. The fact that there’s a sharp, visible and viewable picture is amazing. Outdoors is even better – and sharp pictures.

They’re not incredibly detailed, but it’s certainly the best camera phone I’ve ever used. It’s far less likely you’ll have a great moment or memory ruined by your terrible camera phone performance. I’ll try and get some example shots up later once I’ve found some good artsy subject matter to take pictures of.
There’s also HTC’s burst & panorama modes. They’re not amazing, but they do the job. HTC have also chucked in some extremely accurate Face detection here, and swapped out touch-to-shoot- for touch-to-focus. Haven’t tested out he video yet but I have high hopes for that.

One downside is that you can’t actually view the full res 8MP photos on the device. When you zoom in, things get pixelated. This has to do with the WP7 2048×2048 texture limit I presume, but it’s a slight downer. And of course there’s STILL the thumbnail bug where the colours in the picture thumbnails in the camera reel are different to the actual picture when you begin to zoom in.
But hands down, the camera is the most exciting part if this phone.

There’s also a 1.3 MP front facing camera here. It’s got about the same picture quality as a cheap desktop webcam – It’s serviceable, and nothing to write home about. You can though take videos with it.
There’s also options to turn off continuous focusing and stereo recording when making a video.

Read Johnny’s full review here.

More images after the break.

Here is another picture by Smartphone Daily taken by a HTC Titan. They note it was taken “in a dim office with no flash”  and frankly it looks excellent. See the full-sized version here.

Here is another great example ( via WPCental.com), showing how far HTC has come. See the originals here (Titan / HD7)

Another by Jonny, this time outdoors .  Full size here.

More about the topics: camera, htc titan, windows phone 7.5