With the HTC 10, the Taiwanese company is promising to undo the past wrongs in the cameras of its previous flagship phones. The camera has long a weak point in HTC devices. At first, HTC sacrificed image resolution in the M8 and made the size of individual pixels larger to capture more light (what HTC called Ultrapixel). But the resulting 4 megapixel images were often fuzzy, especially when cropped or enlarged.
To fix the issue, in its next flagship - the M9 - HTC went with smaller individual pixels in a 20-megapixel camera last year, but it still underperformed in extreme situations, such as indoors and close-ups.
In the HTC 10, the company attempts to strike a balance with larger individual pixels (1.55µm), but not as large as before and a 12 megapixel sensor in its camera coupled with a ƒ/1.8 lens.
HTC accepts that in the imaging performance in the M9 was not up to the kind of spec of what they really like to see in a flagship.
HTC is giving a slight boost to the selfie camera — to 5 megapixels. It also lets the screen serve as a front-facing flash. The front camera also features a ƒ/1.8 lens.
The cameras in the HTC 10 boast of a world's first dual optical image stabilisation, making the phone the only to have OIS for the front camera.
According to the company the camera in the new flagship has been designed to launch almost instantly, in as little as 0.6 seconds. The Pro Mode in the HTC 10 camera allows photographing in RAW format.