[Galaxy S 4 General] BarryH_GEG:
Anandtech and GSMArena are the two sites I value most from a review perspective because of their depth and objectivity. But Brian's review of the One's camera was odd.

In it, he said the same thing everyone else did about detail.

In outdoor broad daylight, the HTC One is admittedly at a bit of a disadvantage if you’re looking at things 1:1 on a high resolution display. On a 1080p display or shared on Twitter however, the images from the One are more than adequate.​

But he said this...

[A quote from Anand] I remember talking to Brian after he first learned about what HTC decided to do with the One’s camera system. I believe he said something like “this is exactly what they should be building”. In the three years I’ve worked with Brian I don’t think I’ve ever heard him say that about any smartphone OEM’s decision with any component/subsystem. The strong endorsement was enough to pique my interest in the One.

The HTC One is really built for the kind of scenarios that I find myself in more of the time armed with only a smartphone — evening, dusk or night time, indoors in low light at a restaurant, with friends at a social get together, at a store, or in the confines of my office. It’s there that the One shows the fruits of its tradeoff between resolution and larger pixels..​

Then listed a page of performance issues...

I find that although HTC has lightened up on the sharpening each year, it’s still a bit much for my preferences. With the setting at –2 it appears that sharpening is turned off entirely. If you look at the edge of the lettering it’s immediately obvious how much of a difference this makes.

The real world bench photos look subjectively good to me. Location 3 doesn’t have too much noise in the sky or homogenous parts of the image, location 4 has some slight moire and color rainbowing in the grating, it’s in location 7 that I see a lot of sharpening going on which affects the readability of the menu beyond just the loss of resolution from the camera being 4 MP.

In outdoor broad daylight, the HTC One is admittedly at a bit of a disadvantage if you’re looking at things 1:1 on a high resolution display. On a 1080p display or shared on Twitter however, the images from the One are more than adequate.

There’s still some visible noise reduction at work here which doesn’t make sense since this image was taken at ISO 101. In fact that’s my one big overriding thought about the HTC One by default, there’s a strange combination of noise reduction and sharpening going on at some times, and at first I thought this was overly aggressive JPEG compression, until I learned this is set at 95-percent quality. It is definitely noticeable in the homogenous color regions and textures which there are a lot of in the lights on test photo.

With the lights off, the HTC One oddly continually underexposed the image with the flash on. My other issue is that HTC continues to not light the LED for AF assist during focus, meaning that there were a bunch of out of focus shots before I finally obtained an in-focus shot out of luck.

If we look at crops of the spatial resolution in saggital and tangential orientations from the ISO12233 chart, we can see that the One starts to alias around the 12 or 13 mark (units of line pairs per image height), and other 8 MP shooters alias around the 15 mark or just above. That’s not too much of a surprise however given the fact that it’s a 4 MP camera compared to higher resolution cameras. We can see some odd little demosaicing artifacts as the two lines start to alias as well (the maze-looking pattern).

Both [it and the DNA] have a bit too much sharpening for my tastes, and virtually all the smartphones lose a lot of detail to noise reduction but still manage to have surprisingly noisy sky texture. I still can’t shake the impression that HTC has some JPEG artifacts which accentuate the noise in these relatively homogenous regions as well.

The result is that the One is incredible at stopping motion outdoors, and this seems to have been HTC’s big priority with tuning the One, rather than pushing noise down even further by going perhaps to ISO 50 like we see the iPhone and LG Optimus G Pro do, if the ST CMOS in the One even supports it.​

And then ended with this...

What’s important for HTC is whether the One is the best shooter among Android phones, and that is definitively the case right now. In low light scenarios that are important to me, the One makes the difference between a totally dark image and something usable. It’s only outdoors in broad daylight that the resolution tradeoff is occasionally difficult to stomach, but only if you’re viewing images 1:1 on a computer. Viewed at 1080p or shared online with most services, the One ends up being more than adequate and at the same time able to reach out in low light.​

If Anand himself tests the SGS4 (and I hope he does) and lists a page of performance issues and says it performs poorly in low light but that it doesn't matter because most of his personal use is outdoors and then goes on to declare it the "best Android camera" I'd have the same issue I do with Brian's review of the One. Brian decided the One's camera was "exactly what they should be building” based on a press release and went on to deliver a review that reached that exact same conclusion. It's not a very objective review. That said, it does clearly show where the One's camera is most competent. It'll be interesting to see what Anandtech's take on the SGS4's camera performance is.

This is a good opposing point of view piece for some counter balance on where lack of detail matters...

Yesterday we witnessed what very well could be a turning point for HTC: the announcement of their new One flagship. With it, they announced a new UltraPixel Camera technology that uses two 4MP camera sensors to take shots that have vastly improved lightning exposure, according to the company. We have yet to test the camera on the One on our own, but one thing is for sure: 4MP is just not enough, despite HTC’s claim that “Megapixels don’t matter.” Of course they matter.

Consider this. The Nexus 10′s screen is a full 4.0 MP (at 2560×1600). If you pull up a full-resolution photo you’ve taken on an HTC One on the Nexus 10, you can’t zoom in because there is no more image data. Do this on the iPad (which has a slightly lower screen resolution), you’ll get similar results. Even if you zoom in on the One’s 1920×1080 (that’s 2MP) display, forget about being able to zoom in on a photo of a group of people to see detail in an individual’s face. There’s just not enough data there at 4MP.

We can agree that Megapixels don’t matter, to a point. Meaning, most consumers won’t notice (or care) about the difference between 8MP and 12MP. But at 4MP, even if you’re improving the photo quality, you’re negatively impacting the experience by taking away pixels. For most use case scenarios, 8MP is good enough, which is why the majority of smartphones take pictures at that resolution.

http://pocketnow.com/2013/02/20/megapixels-matter-htc-ultrapixel​