News - HTC Titan 2 boasts show-stopping 16 megapixel camera

[HEXUS]

HTC reveals its latest Windows Phone equipped with 16 megapixel snapper.

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[1stRaven]

Yes please. Its actually worth an upgrade to this, if it actually makes its way over here.

[cheesemp]

Hmm. Nice specs but apart from higher res camera not that different from the other high end android phones. I'm just not a fan of metro so its no from me.

[crossy]

16mp camera is nice - but surely without decent optics (including optical zoom) then surely this is all just blatant specmanship?

To be honest I'd be more impressed by someone (cough, cough - like Sony for example) who came out with a lower res, say 6-8Mpix, camera on a phone coupled with 3-4x optical zoom. I've seen thin digital camera that use some witchcraft to keep the zooming part of the lens inside the body, so surely it must be possible on a device that's not being optimised for thinness.

If WP7 had better app support - particularly a decent satnav app - then I'd seriously consider it. Otherwise I'll be staying with Android come contract renewal time.

[Saracen]

16mp camera is nice - but surely without decent optics (including optical zoom) then surely this is all just blatant specmanship? .....

Absolutely.

It could be a trillion pixel sensor, and if the lens is a poor relation to a 17th century milk bottle bottom, you'll still get lousy photos.

This reality is trickling down to users of proper cameras, hence lenses from (or at least, to the standards of) Leica, Schneider and Carl Zeiss, etc, even on some relatively low-end compacts.

Also, I wonder what anyone using a phone for a camera will do with a 16MP image that they can't do with an 8MP image .... or even a 5MP image, for that matter. I've got an ancient (about 10 years) Olympus point and shoot camera with a really, REALLY good lens, and it will (and has) done a very job job of images printed up to about A3.

So unless you're either printing on the (whole) side of a lorry (unlikely) or cropping to a very small part of the image (plausible, but then, the picture was taken from the wrong place) 1 16MP sensor will make almost no real-world difference to users .... except for bragging rights about the size of their ..... sensor.

[Spud1]

So basically this is exactly the same as the HTC Titan that I own, apart from having a slightly better camera and LTE support..the former of which is not worth a £400-£500 upgrade, and the latter is useless in the UK atm. Right. Oh and a slightly bigger battery..mmm

I do love my Titan for it's screen - but this is also it's biggest weakness..its 480x800 which is rather low resolution, and HTC don't appear to have fixed this with the Titan 2..that's a big shame.

Personally I'm still really really looking forward to the Blackberry London and atm that's my choice for best mobile of 2012 - purely because BBX is looking awesome at the moment..RIM have already proved that QNX is a stonkingly good basis for a mobile OS with the playbook (only lacking in apps atm), and if it survives the transition to a mobile phone device, we'll be in for a treat.

[Animus404]

Lets be honest, it's not really the Titan2 is it. It's more like the Titan SP1 or 1.5 or something.

@Spud1 I agree that this isn't the best resolution ever, but I own a Titan and I don't see it as an issue, the Metro UI is all straight lines and unless I hold the phone 6inches from my face I can't see any pixels.

@Crossy there are lots of GPS apps some of them are very good but for turn by turn navigation there are only 2 real options, Navigon and Navigation. Navigon is too expensive, £70ish and Navigation imho isn't very good. I also think the platform could do with a better twitter client.

[vrykyl]

HTC cant fix the res on the titan 2 - its microsofts fault - afaik wp7 doesnt support res's above 800x480 OR dual core processors yet... hence the constant flow of near identical underwhelming spec single core wp7 phones that keep appearing...

What someone needs to do (samsung im looking at you) is make a 1.8-2ghz single core phone with the super amoled plus screen from the gs2 - or beat microsoft until they fix their archaic limits!

[Mapester]

I'd say they will definatly go budget on the lense for this phone and most people see bigger megapixel number and assume its going to be better. Ive got my now rather old and dated Nokia N95 5mp camera which has a Carl Zeiss lense and it takes much better photos that my current HTC Desire HD 8mp camera.

Its a shame there are not alot of phones that have decent lenses to accompany there cameras.

[miniyazz]

It also has a F2.6 aperture, perfect for shooting in low-light conditions

Useful. Not perfect.

[keithwalton]

Looks like it has a reasonable at least sized lens. f/2.6 seems to be quite poor though with the iphone 4s and sony xperia s having f/2.4 (lower is better) but much smaller lenses

[crossy]

@Crossy there are lots of GPS apps some of them are very good but for turn by turn navigation there are only 2 real options, Navigon and Navigation. Navigon is too expensive, £70ish and Navigation imho isn't very good. I also think the platform could do with a better twitter client.

Thanks for that! At the moment I switch between Google Maps and ALK CoPilot - neither of which are on WP7, (although I know there's "gMaps Pro" which is an unofficial Google Maps implementation). Maybe by the time I come to change my phone (July) this'll have all changed and I can consider WP7 as a possible replacement to Android.

I'd say they will definatly go budget on the lense for this phone and most people see bigger megapixel number and assume its going to be better. Ive got my now rather old and dated Nokia N95 5mp camera which has a Carl Zeiss lense and it takes much better photos that my current HTC Desire HD 8mp camera. Its a shame there are not alot of phones that have decent lenses to accompany there cameras.

I too was impressed with the old N95's camera - not only was it capable of starting a lot faster than that on the SE X10 that replaced it, but also it gave (arguably) better shot quality on the whole, (although the X10's was streets ahead for macro shots).
Here's a thought - now that Nokia are doing WP7, is it possible that the title of "best WP7 camera phone" will go to whatever Nokia launch at MWC next month? Given that they (generally speaking) seem to have a good reputation for their phone cameras I wouldn't see that as much of a logical leap.