HTC Incredible Camera – A Closer Look

Sadly my time with the HTC Incredible was cut short because I had to return it back to Verizon, it happens, being a reviewer you many times run across ‘loaner’ products, oh well, maybe I’ll switch to Verizon to get one! The camera on the HTC Incredible is probably the best cell phone camera on the market today, I’m sure it can even rival that of many lower to mid priced point and shoot cameras out there. Doug asked me to take a quick look at the camera and report on it before I had to return it so that’s what I’m doing today. I’ve got pictures of the interface and many picture samples for you to view to check out the quality. So here ya go Doug, enjoy!

Ok, we know the HTC Incredible has a 8mp camera, and that’s pretty big for a cell phone. The only one that might rival it at this point is that of the Nokia N8, but I haven’t had the chance to play with that phone just yet.

The camera can be used in either landscape or portrait mode.

There’s a small little tab on the left side of the screen that if you swipe to the right it will open to reveal the settings. On the right side, at the top is the flash adjustment button, below that is the zoom.

When you touch the zoom button a slider opens on the right side so you can easily just slide up or down to zoom in or out.

Here’s the settings for you. The first menu is basic just choose between Photo or Video:

The next would be the Brightness, here again we se a slider for adjustment:

The next is image properties with three sliders for contrast, saturation and sharpness:

The next setting is for Effects but we’ll look closer at that later, the last setting is called settings.

So let’s jump back to the Effects settings, you’ve got quite a few choices to make your pictures look a bit artistic.

Here’s some examples for you in order:

Ok, when I took the pictures with the HTC Incredible I left the flash on auto and didn’t do anything with the settings, I wanted things to be default as many people won’t be changing settings too much. Yes I know some of you will delve into the camera settings and really make it your own, but by me doing that it will change the outcome of the pictures here and they wouldn’t be typical results that the average user might expect.

So the flash was on auto and the room I took the pictures in was very well lit with a five light bulb chandelier on the ceiling and the window blinds open allowing the sunlight to come in. I should also mention that all of the settings were on high.

The flash only went off a couple times total.

Here’s pictures taken from about five feet away and zoomed in:

One of the times the flash went off was when I was taking pictures of the Motorola Backflip. As you can see the flash is fairly bright:

Here’s several more examples of the Pantech Link, and the Backflip:

The pictures do seem a bit dark even though the room was actually very bright, and I used a bright white background.

A lot of cameras have issues with black and focusing on it, so I grabbed the new Canon Vixia HFR10 which is basically black:

Here again the flash did not go off though which is surprising, my regular camera would have flashed with the black object in auto flash mode. The blacks though aren’t exactly dark black, but they’re close. If you look at the third picture above it actually has a brown hue to it..

Here’s a couple close up shots of my Wicked Lasers Spyder II:

So the HTC Incredible works well with black and dark colors we know that, now let’s check out how it does with colorful objects.

Here’s several shots of colorful Xbox360 and Wii boxes from a distance and very close up:

The HTC Incredible doesn’t have a macro mode, but as you can see it takes very good close up pictures. Some of the pictures are a bit grainy yes, you do have to hold the phone very still, but it’s much more forgiving on movement than any other phone I’ve ever used.

Here’s three pictures taken in portrait mode just because:

The last picture I have for you is one taken in a dark room basically. It was taken in the next room, with no lights on, with a little light coming in from the other room. Yes the flash did go off as expected.

As you can see the flash doesn’t work too well with reflective surfaces, but then again most don’t.

I’m truly impressed with the picture quality of the HTC Incredible, it is probably the best cell phone camera on the market today. Being a reviewer I’ve taken a look at a lot of phones in my time and I can honestly say it’s the best camera on a phone out there today.

You might wonder why I didn’t take any pictures outside, well taking them in natural light always works very well. Most every phone I’ve looked at can take a good picture outside in the sunlight, it’s inside where the problems occur.

The video camera on the HTC Incredible isn’t too shabby either, no I don’t have any samples for you.

The video camera though is very good as well, outside it takes very nice videos, they’re slightly grainy but overall much better than any other phone based camera out there. Taking videos inside though they’re quite a bit more grainy, but again still much better than any other camera…