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Right then, this is a new one on me; have any of you guys ever heard of the term “ultrapixels” before? I realise I may have to turn in my nerdery badge after admitting this (and change my name from Technical Markus to Ignorant Pillock Markus), but I haven’t. That’s a bit of a disadvantage right now, as it turns out, because according to Pocket-Lint, HTC is going to dump the concept of megapixels, in the (rumoured to be) upcoming HTC M7, and instead, use a camera that’s got ultrapixels in the product description.
That’s lovely, and everything, and I’m sure it’ll make the next HTC phone awesome, but the big question is this: what the chuff, right, is an ultrapixel? Let’s find out!
The first thing to point out is that the image sensors in the HTC M7 will still be measured in megapixels. You’ll note, though, that I pluralised the word ‘sensors’ in that last sentence, and that, right there, is the kinda the point; the HTC M7 won’t have one image sensor, it’ll have three, each one of ‘em coming in at 4.3MP. So, in effect, the phone will have a total of 13 megapixels.
It won’t output images at 13 megapixels, though…
Do you remember how the PureView camera, that Nokia came up with, actually worked? It had a 41MP camera, but the final image was output at 8 megapixels, because each pixel in the final image was created using the information from five pixels inside the sensor, using a process called oversampling. What you got, at the end of that process, was an 8 megapixel image that was a hell of a lot sharper than other 8MP phones (the Samsung Galaxy S3 springs immediately to mind). Apparently, it’ll work the same way in the HTC M7, so you get a 4MP image that’s all super-sharp and lovely.
Anyway, we’ll see how true this rumour is (and how awesome the pics are, if it is true), when the HTC M7 gets unveiled…
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