The HTC Droid Incredible Review, Clearly Better than the Nexus One

The Camera

HTC outfitted the Incredible with an 8 megapixel camera with a default resolution of 3264 x 1952. Like the Nexus One, the Incredible’s Camera is very fast. You get a smooth frame rate from the live viewfinder, and there’s minimal shutter lag. It makes the iPhone 3GS' camera feel archaic by comparison, like I've just dusted off my first point and shoot from 13 years ago.

Unlike the Nexus One, HTC’s camera app gives you a lot of control over the post processing of your photos. You can adjust brightness, contrast, saturation and sharpness. There are even white balance and ISO settings. While I found these items more of a pain to use (who wants to mess with sharpness settings on a smartphone camera?), I do appreciate the option.

The Incredible comes with a blindingly bright LED flash that actually makes low light photography possible. We are talking about a very tiny lens so low light performance, even with the flash, is grainy:

But in a pinch it works just fine, which is more than I can say for the iPhone’s camera in low light conditions.

The flash can be forced on/off or left on auto mode. This is important because the flash has the tendency to blow out photos when used indoors.

Outdoor performance is great but be warned that the photos look better on the ultra high density screen than they do blown up at full resolution.

Browsing through photos in the camera app is very fast and uses the swipe gesture, again an improvement over the Nexus One. And just like the rest of the phone, you have tight integration with online services within the camera app itself. You’re two taps away from sharing any photo you take via Facebook, Twitter, Flickr or the usual suspects (MMS, Email). I’ll say that the HTC Incredible was the first smartphone I really found myself using as a camera on a regular basis simply because of its speed, quality and ease of use.

Smartphone cameras are quickly making headway in becoming the point and shoot camera of choice. I’ve seen demos of smartphones that have two lenses (one wide angle and one telephoto) and use a fast SoC to combine the output of both to produce photos where everything is sharp and in focus.

In the case of the HTC Incredible however, there’s a very practical use of its high quality camera today...