Why does HTC make sub-par cameras?

[Jerry Hildenbrand]

The main thing to worry about is ISO. Tap menu, and then the icon with the gears, then ISO.

(For those unfamiliar, ISO describes the camera's sensitivity to light. The higher the ISO, the dimmer the light you can take a pic in. But also the more noise there will be in the image.)

Auto seems to work fine outdoors, but you could manually set 100 for bright sunlight, and 200 for cloudy days.

Indoors, be sure to tap the screen where you want it to focus. The software seems to use the focus point to set flash exposure. If the camera is focused on something behind your subject, your subject will be overexposed.

If you're shooting indoors and don't want flash, you'll need to manually set ISO. The camera seems to want to use ISO 100 even in dim light. I'd suggest trying 400 in normal room light. On this small a sensor, anything over 400 is going to be really noisy.

And remember you can see the pic right away. If it's too bright or dark, you can reshoot. The "sun" symbol lets you adjust brightness up or down. If the pic seems "flat" and lacking contrast, the half-filled circle can give you some help. Don't go too crazy with these settings, though. Small adjustments are usually better than large.

And another thanks from me!

 

[ywenz]

The EVO has a strong camera compared to almost all the other phones. However, the iphone 4 has set a new bar for cell phone cameras. I've viewed some nice EVO shots but even the best ones shows significant technical deficiencies either at the sensor level or at the software image processing level. Mind you, deficiencies in this context is compared to an average/good P&S camera.

I understand that not everyone will care about the difference in image quality between the EVO and iphone 4's cameras and I suspect that is also the reason HTC went with the camera system that's in the EVO. In short, iphone 4's camera is P&S digital camera quality. The camera in the EVO still have a ways to go before reaching that level.

I hope there might be some software updates in the future to improve the image quality of the EVO. The stills exhibit strong haloing and the 8MP sensor is a poor sensor because the individual pixels are muddled together when you view at 100%.

Granted all this commentary is coming from someone who has $10K+ worth of Canon DSLR and shoots professionally so I'm naturally anal when it comes to these things.

That being said, The sum of iPhone + ATT isn't better than the sum of EVO + Sprint.