With the launch of the HTC One, the mobile industry has ushered into the era of ‘UltraPixel’ leaving megapixels far behind. Being the first device with the UltraPixel Camera, the technology behind the same is something that has got our attention.
“We know that the industry, essentially, has been shipping this big fat lie” about megapixels, HTC’s Director of special projects, Symon Whitehorn, argues. Sensors that try to pack too many megapixels into too small of a space are “carrying a load of crap,” he says, in the form of “extraneous data that you don’t want.”
In reality, the ultrapixel camera of HTC is just a 4 megapixel camera in which every pixel gathers 300 percent more light than conventional sensors thus allowing more light for a richer image even in low light conditions.
What HTC has done to snub competition is that it has made its megapixels bigger than the megapixels on other phones. Fewer pixels on an identical surface area means the pixels are bigger, thus the HTC One has larger 2 micrometres pixels compared to most having about 1.4 micrometres pixels.
Once the HTC One is finally out, we could verify if what HTC said earlier is true: “it’s not the pixel count of the sensor that matters, but the size of the pixels.”
