Another week, another challenger to the Nokia N8's camera crown. This time the HTC One X, a fast, large screened Android 4 smartphone with next-gen camera hardware, including dedicated image processor, F2.0 aperture and variable intensity flash. It's very fast at taking rapid fire photos and has the nice trick of being able to shoot photos and video concurrently, but what I was interested in, as always, was whether the photos it took were any good! Using six varied test cases, I too a closer look....
For a full review of the HTC One X, you'll have to be patient for another week and wait for Phones Show 166. It'll be a cracker, since the HTC One X is really generally a fabulous smartphone - the processor's quad core and the display is unbelievable. However, this is a camera comparison and the device produces photos which aren't as detailed or as pleasing as those from the 2010 Nokia N8 - the much larger sensor, the Carl Zeiss optics and the Xenon flash all add up to images which still rule the (camera) phone world in April 2012.And it's worth remembering that the N8 itself produces images which, arguably, pale compared to its own successor, the 808 PureView, coming in a couple of months. But let's not get ahead of ourselves.
I took the N8 and the One X and tried a number of test shots in various conditions. People have asked why I keep comparing modern camera phones to the N8 - it's not that I see them as direct competitors in terms of overall aims and functionality. But one has to have a benchmark, something to measure everything else against. As the best (and something I always have to hand), the N8 camera is this benchmark, at least when comparing phone camera functions. So, for example, phone A's camera gets 'close' to the N8, while phone B's unit is miles away. You get the idea.
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