Is optical Image stabilization(ois) a software thing or a hardware thing?

[Sithara Ariyarathna]

I got to know that HTC One M9 doesn't feature OIS in its camera.But can HTC bring OIS to One M9 with its last software changes?

 

[SpookDroid]

Nope. OPTICAL Image Stabilization is a hardware thing (with the optics of the camera), involving self-stabilizing, moving lenses.

They CAN, however, bring Digital Image Stabilization, which is digitally analyzing the video and trying to crop and rotate accordingly to stabilize the image, but you might lose certain portions of the full video. OIS doesn't lose anything because it's stabilizing the lenses, not the digital output.