We’ve seen the HTC One go up against some of the best smartphones in the market under various lighting conditions, but if there is one area where the Ultrapixel camera on the HTC One should excel, it is under low-light conditions. As such, we pitted the HTC One against two of the best smartphone cameras in the market: the Apple iPhone 5 and naturally the Nokia Lumia 920 (with the new Portico update installed).
Similar to our earlier shootout, all smartphones were set to the same settings and without any manual adjustments. All images in each scenario were also taken within seconds of each other for consistency. Find out how each smartphone fared after the jump.
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Indoor Low Light, Automatic, No Flash
HTC One
Nokia Lumia 920
Apple iPhone 5
Indoor Low Light, Macro (where applicable), No Flash
HTC One
Nokia Lumia 920
Apple iPhone 5
Outdoor Low Light, Automatic, No Flash
HTC One
Nokia Lumia 920
Apple iPhone 5
Outdoor Low Light, Automatic, No Flash
HTC One
Nokia Lumia 920
Apple iPhone 5
From the test images above, it is clear that there is no clear winner in this low-light shootout. Firstly, while images shot on the iPhone 5 may not be the brightest and are certainly noisier, they had the most accurate representation of the ambient light in the area.
What about the Lumia 920? While the PureView sensor is indeed highly capable in low light conditions, it continues to struggle with white balance – which is evident in our indoor shots, where the ambient light was from incandescent light bulbs. Also, the Lumia 920 is guilty of taking in too much light – as is evident in the outdoor landscape image. We took the shot at around 7.30pm, but the image looked more like it was shot at 7.30am.
What is evident, though, is that the Ultrapixel camera does indeed capture a lot of light – just as HTC said it would. The sensor strikes a good balance in capturing enough ambient light without overexposing the image, which makes for a good low-light shot – even if the resulting image is sorely lacking in detail (which also plagues images shot in normal lighting). While the Ultrapixel is capable of relatively good images in any lighting condition, those who wish for a more capable camera may end up felling very underwhelmed with its low-resolution shots.