The HTC One M9 got a little better today with the roll-out of RAW image support through a Google Play update of the HTC Camera app. With the update installed, Raw Camera is added in as a separate camera mode. As you might imagine, all the user settings are disables when the RAW Camera mode is selected. The camera screen gives you the option to dive into the general camera settings, toggle the flash, open your gallery or swap a RAW image with the shutter button. Since the HTC One M9 is not capable of viewing the 38.5 MB RAW DNG files, the phone will save a JPG version of the picture as well.

NOTE: You can open the DNG raw files with third-party app like Adobe Lightroom

To see if the new RAW images were any better than JPG images that the HTC One M9 captures in Auto mode, we took the phone out for a quick excursion. As you can see below, the RAW images captured by the HTC One M9 are significantly different from those captured in Auto mode. In addition to capturing more detail, the RAW image are brighter and slightly more saturated than the JPG counterpart. Yes, there is visible grain when viewing the HTC One M9’s RAW images at a 100%, but we’d argue that the grain is much better than the blurry smudging that’s applied when the HTC One M9 converts the images to JPGs.

We are not able to host the 38.5MB RAW images on our site, but 100% crops below will give you a clear idea of the quality bump offered by the RAW image files. While it’s nice to know that the HTC One M9 is capable of capturing RAW images, the feature is completely useless for most M9 owners since the files can only be opened on a computer and you’ll also need Photoshop, Lightroom or Gimp.

You can download the full resolution JPG files here.