HTC M7 vs. Nokia Lumia: Is the 13 Ultrapixel Camera or the 41 Megapixel Camera the Future?

It seems like VHS vs Beta-max all over again. Yesterday had two announcements from two different phone makers about two different mobile camera technologies that will supposedly change the future of image-making.

HTC announced that their upcoming new flagship M7 smartphone will have a main camera that should not be measured in megapixels, but rather in a new image-quality measurement term: "Ultrapixels." At the same time, Finnish smartphone manufacturer Nokia announced that it would be bringing their 41-megapixel PureView sensor to the Lumia series of smartphones this summer.

Ultrapixels? An unheard-of 41 megapixels? What's it all mean? The 41-megapixel camera boasts five times the resolution of most top-of-the-line mobile cameras. It originally turned up last year on the now-defunct Nokia 808 and got a lot of attention. According to the Guardian, the 41-megapixel camera doesn't take humongous wall-sized pictures, but rather it makes good images in low light. This is because, while the camera sensor produces about a 5-megapixel sized image, it oversamples each pixel of the image. The more redundant pixels you have, the less image noise - those random specks of color - and blurriness caused by data errors, especially in low light.

Redundancy seems to be what HTC is going for in their Ultrapixel cameras, as well. What HTC was saying in their lexicographical announcement is that they don't want to measure camera quality by megapixels anymore, because megapixels imply a single sensor in the camera. Instead of a 13-megapixel sensor, HTC's M7 will have three 4.3-megapixel sensors which produce image layers - or one might say redundant pixel data - which is advertised to produce crisper, clearer, and more color-accurate photos. We'll have to see which does better in low light, the Nokia 41-megapixel or the HTC 13-ultrapixel.

Whether in the future the industry decides to pursue cameras with ultra-high megapixel sensors or a series of coordinated sensors in one "ultrapixel" camera is up to the tech sooth-sayers. Either way, expect images taken on your cell phone to increasingly look like pictures, and not cell-phone images.