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Finally had my first hands on the M8



in short the very best thing about the M8 is actually the camera and the best thing about the camra is the software / speed and the best thing about the software / speed is: Manual Mode



really this is just incredible on a phone and i didn't expect it to work so well, for those who have asked "why slowing down the shutter all the way down results in a white photo" well what do you expect? basic photography principal, slowing down the shutter means more exposure time, the more exposure the more light gets in, so as you extend exposure time you get better quality and more light but slower speed hence motion blur, if you go too far in indoor moderate light or outdoor the camera will be blinded by all the light, you need to subtly slide the shutter time to find the sweet spot in dynamic range, in other words you only to really to slow down the shutter all the way down in extreme darkness



but the very best of all is manual focus which works just like analog, you slide all the way down for super close macro or all the way back for infinite focus (no more missed macro or landscape shots) there is a macro and a landscape scenes for that but personally if i am capturing anything still life like landscape it will be Manual mode and only manual mode



in terms of stills i i didn't miss OIS at all as the motion blur is fought pretty hard even with slower shutter times, in fact i would say it fights motion blur a lot better than the M7, however i did notice that auto focus sometimes didn't lock correctly on target (indoor moderate light) the only weakness of this sensor is chromatic limits visible when taking a shot of spotlights, the lights show chromatic jagged issues around the edges



eitherway i am simply floored, HTC can put any hardware they want on this because simply the software is out of this world, they are basically milking this sensor at this point and the results really show, coming from the M7 it feels a like a complete new camera



in manual mode i had ISO all the way down and exposure at medium, so really image quality and the famous over exposure is totally in your hands



so what's the worst thing about the M8? Ufocus, i know you guys have posted tons of great results but seriously for the flagship feature of the second sensor this is really needs to work a lot better, so many limitations and rules and so hard to get right, the device i tested was with base 1.12.x and i know things are a lot better with 1.54.x but still like i said, they've extended the height of the phone and added an entire second camera in there, Ufocus should have worked considerably better day one



anyway just to prove how easy it is to control and snap with this camera, i snapped all these in just few minutes (indoor at night with spot lights)



Auto: ISO-200 Exposure 1/30





notice how on auto it slightly over exposed the top of the droidnow the fun part, Manual mode: almost a professional camera my friendsdon't forget you can always save your favorite manual mode settings as custom scenes for later use , you can also use auto values in manual but cap their maximumManual: ISO-100, Exposure 1/15, basically i slowed down the shutter time until i had good exposure, did you say poor dynamic range? (i still find this image hard to believe that it's coming from a phone) this is not ufocus it's the natural bokeh of this phoneManual: ISO-200, Exposure 1/30, Manual focus into closeupManual: ISO-250, Exposure 1/30, Manual focus into max distance (thanks to manual our focus is completely decoupled from exposure)Manual: ISO-160, Exposure 1/15nothing sexy about this except proving there is no left side blur and the only thing resembling distance in my location (the ceiling spots are of different colors at my friend's shop so the colors didn't look so great here) check out the full resolution image and a few more using just auto mode and auto focus, this thing takes better closeups than any device i have ever tried and color wise: it wipes the floor with the M7by the way all these shots with default sharpness, it's good but can look a bit odd at only certain edges, for that i only recommend dropping sharpness to -0.5flickr set:HTC simply needs to advertise it as the fastest camera in this world and professional manual controls > that would be make more sense to people than explaining the large pixel advantage