The new flagship HTC One M9 received an updated camera with a huge (by the standards of HTC) sensor resolution – 20 megapixels. And although the sensor itself is not the newest used here, in general the pictures from the smartphone can be called good. The situation is familiar – in the daytime the device allows you to take very good shots, and with a lack of lighting, the picture deteriorates. And yet, after the announcement of HTC One M9, many were dissatisfied with the smartphone camera, comparing it with cameras in the Apple iPhone 6 Plus, Samsung Galaxy S6 and a couple of other models and seeing a loss. To the credit of the Taiwanese HTC, the company quickly responded to criticism regarding the camera and added a RAW shooting mode in the next update. In theory, the RAW format allows you to get more detailed and high-quality images, with which you just need to work a little after shooting in order to bring the photos to their final look, that is, to perform the actions that smartphone electronics usually carry out, receiving an image from the sensor and packing it into a compact format JPEG. In this post, I'll show you sample photos captured in JPEG and RAW, and then suggest that you think together how much RAW is in demand in the smartphone HTC One M9.
All photos below are in their original size and format, without processing, the pictures are simply copied from a smartphone. Photos were taken with a tripod in order to eliminate the shaking factor. The shooting was carried out in a completely manual mode in RAW format, then I unloaded the original images and JPEG versions. I compared the photos in JPEG converted from RAW by the smartphone with the JPEG files taken in the usual manual mode (without conversion from RAW inside the smartphone), I did not notice the difference between these two versions of the jeep.
You can download all the photos here.
To view the images, I recommend using Adobe Photoshop, because the DNG extension, which makes RAW files HTC One M9, is native to Abobe. In applications like ACDSee, photos can look strange, display with artifacts, and so on.
Does it make sense to shoot with HTC One M9 in RAW format? I want to address this question to you, dear readers. In my opinion, this whole venture makes sense if you took your smartphone on a trip or an important trip, from where you definitely need to bring good shots, and you forgot your camera. In this case, you have few options and, of course, it is better to shoot in RAW format, so that later you will be able to extract a slightly better quality from the photos than usual JPEG. But I personally don't see the point in taking RAW photos just like that, every day. If you do not consider the frames taken on HTC One M9, pixel by pixel, the difference between RAW and RAM is not always easy to catch, and when it is visible, it is far from obvious that RAW looks preferable. After all, do not forget that in JPEG, electronics embellish the picture and sometimes these algorithms look quite appropriate, so there is simply no need for post-processing. What do you think?