PBlog: HTC is a Taiwanese company and I’m guessing the phones are put together in Taiwan. Yet you’re based in San Francisco. So how does that all work?

HTC: There’s a lot of time spent on planes! Plus we’re a global company, so we have hubs all over the world. There’s a West Coast perspective and an Asian market perspective, plus of course you have the European perspective.

PBlog: Historically those markets tend to be quite different in terms of what the customer wants. Do you ever butt heads when it comes to product development?

HTC: We have some pretty interesting debates! You have to have some sensitivity to each market. You can’t just go in and say ‘this is right’. I come from a ‘pure’ photographic background, so I can place an esoteric photographic perspective on things and bang on about my Leicas. Conversations can get intriguing, but I think it leads to really healthy debate. You want that global input but at the same time you don’t want to distill it down to something meaningless. You’ve got to have a point of view.

PBlog: In terms of cameras within phones, those in the photographic industry are nervous about the on-going effect it’s having on dedicated camera sales. Are you of the opinion that eventually the likes of Canon and Nikon will only exist in the mass market as ‘apps’ on your smartphone?

HTC: I think the camera business is going to continue to exist in one form or another. I don’t think they should feel threatened. We don’t consciously go out to challenge these cameras and take away their market. If anything our team are absolute camera enthusiasts because we have that photographic background. Light and glass has physical properties so there are some things that you just can’t do without. I think the differentiating factor is that because these have a brain of their own behind the lens, all of a sudden we’ve realised that it’s not just a smartphone, it’s actually a smart camera.

Whilst smartphones have already pretty much swallowed up point and shoot cameras, swallowing up the likes of a DSLR is a real challenge. But we can close the gap and certainly give you some of the experience.

PBlog: So in terms a smartphone camera, as it stands here today, is the HTC One M8 pretty much your dream device? Or are there still things you want to add?

HTC: It’s pretty much at the limits of what technology can do today – it has a fantastic camera. But we always dream beyond and think about making it better.  Even though it’s a working product it has a lot more that we can continue to exploit. So we will continue to update the camera and you will see improvements in its algorithms and more subtlety and variation as it grows. But we want to release an SDK kit, which will allow other people to develop for the platform and feed that back into the community. The plan is that there are certain values that people will have access to via the SDK kit that will enable them to tweak and play with.

PBlog: And tell me a bit more about the dual cameras, because this is obviously another way in which the latest phone differentiates itself. As I understand it, you can take your image and then alter which portions of the frame are in focus afterwards, a bit like the Lytro camera from last year.

HTC: Yes but it’s fundamentally different from the Lytro camera. While I really admire the concept, a lot of that came from the idea of ‘after focus’, which we can do as well. But essentially you end up with a very small resolution image yet a big data file. We achieve the concept slightly differently by having this stereoscopic view and we assign value to each pixel, with regard to its range and distance from the next pixel. We can even tell how we’ve moved on from the previous shot. So there’s a lot of information that we can potentially gain from. The primary benefit is that we can understand the spatial relationship between the pixels and therefore identify different objects and create different effects with that, like isolating and masking portions of the image. Essentially it’s adding data to each pixel, which Lytro doesn’t really do. It’s a different approach.

PBlog: And in terms of how it’s physically capturing the image and storing it, you’ve got two cameras there and two sensors, with one allied to each?

HTC: They have individual sensors, yes. But the secondary sensor is only supplying information. There is no imaging data being taken from that sensor to produce the image. One’s the four ‘ultrapixel’ camera, the other is at 2.1, so you couldn’t merge the two anyway. What it’s adding is the information from those pixels so that we can correlate between them – so literally range finding.

PBlog: And why did you feel the need to go for this dual camera set up – was it to make a statement, or just because you can?

HTC: It comes back to my statement earlier about how we close the gap and challenge cameras. For HTC, design is really important. As for the physical look and feel, we make the best looking Android phones and I’ll say that with every bit of prejudice. Which means that we’re not going to stick a great big honking lens on there. So we have to think laterally about how achieve some of the improvements to image quality.

PBlog: I notice the latest phone doesn’t yet support Raw files?

HTC: No.

PBlog: Is that something you might consider for the future?

HTC: Absolutely. It’s something I’m very keen on. It’s something we have discussed and all I’ll say officially is that it’s of interest. But once again we go back to the fact that 90% of our users don’t care.  They don’t want that big file structure and for them the burden may outweigh the benefit. But watch this space. I’m quite happy with the JPEGs from this, but on my Fuji X series and Leica M9 I’m shooting Raw, because it’s a different photographic experience.

PBlog: The HTC M7, M8… any allusions there to a Leica camera?

HTC: Completely accidental! Some people think of BMW cars as well…

PBlog: Are there any exciting new filter effects on this phone that weren’t there with the previous generation?

HTC: Yes, we’ve broadened the filters and added many more themes. And we have more coming down the line.

PBlog: Another nice aspect of the latest model is the microSD card slot that allows the capacity to be expanded to 128GB. How important was keeping the option of removable media? Some previous generations of phone got rid of it?

HTC: We had a lot of user feedback and people like to future proof themselves. We found a lot of people didn’t need it, although there was some discomfort initially about not having the ‘emotional security’ of a card slot. But it’s not just about photography – there are other media that people might want to put on there, to be honest. Plus, with the M7 we had certain constraints in the design that we don’t have with the new model.  By wrapping the metal up around the side we can actually incorporate the card slot without making compromises. So here the card slot wasn’t a compromise, whereas it would have been with the M7.

PBlog: And, going back to the option to re-focus images once you’ve taken them; why did you feel that was a good idea. Were people asking for that ability?

HTC: Information imaging is enabling us to come up with all sorts of applications, being able to re-focus a shot being one of them. As we know with these lenses, we also have extremely short TTL. You’re already got an aperture of f/2.0 and you're getting infinite depth of field because the thing is so wide and so short. So we wanted to have more depth of field control within the camera.

A lot of people maybe can’t articulate it clearly but they might say ‘oh, that’s a pro look’. And often what they’re talking about is depth of field. When I was briefing the team about what I wanted, I would bring sample prints in and saying ‘this was shot on my old M6 Leica with an old Summicron lens and I want to have this kind of bokeh background….’ We often have people asking ‘can you get a Leica inside it?’ The answer’s no, but we can approximate it and do some interesting things! We’ve had film, we’ve had digital and now we’re into the ‘information imaging’ age. This not just set up for photographic effects but also awareness and understanding. If I’m looking at the world, how can I start understanding it more? I think essentially that’s where cameras are heading. For 100 years cameras have been seen as a way of capturing memories. Now we’re looking at a way of augmenting memories and adding to it.

PBlog: My understanding is that your HTC Zoe feature has already been doing a bit of that? In being able to capture a moving image and a still footage and blend them together, for example.

HTC: Well that’s always been the desire… ‘Zoe’ derives from Zoetrope and the very early days of moving images. The Zoe effect comes out of our desire to capture those moments more dimensionally. We feel people are moving from sharing images to actually broadcasting their life. And ‘Zoe’ is the first step on that path. I also think that the highlight movie stuff is very intriguing too. The idea that you can throw out the video editor and just have this thing go ahead and develop a reel for you, remix it and share it. In the future we’ll be thinking about multiple perspectives, different information imaging, and cameras that can talk to each other and collaborate.

PBlog: Whilst it doesn’t sound like it, do you feel at all limited by the tiny optics that you have in a smartphone, as opposed to the larger glass on a dedicated digital camera? Or do the limitations in fact encourage your creativity?

HTC: Yes, they challenge us. Although the camera is one of the most important features in most people’s phones, it has to be balanced with the other things that the phone does. I can’t take up all the real estate with a big piece of glass, as much as I want to. There are creative challenges.

PBlog: What do you think of Sony and Kodak bringing out these ‘smart’ lenses that can interact with your smartphone via Wi-Fi and NFC? Do you see that as one solution, or the way things are going?

HTC: Not necessarily. Because there are still the same problems that you have with your ‘real’ camera – in that you’re sometimes going to forget it, or that it won’t sit comfortably in your pocket. It doesn’t solve that problem. We want to invest more in making this the best camera in your pocket. I’ve played with those smart lenses and kind of feel it’s not much of a jump to actually carrying the full camera around. I want to applaud the innovation involved, but that’s not our business. We’ve played with the idea of having a pull down menu that lets you pick your lenses.

PBlog: I guess we’ve almost come to the stage now where enthusiasts could have their smartphone in their pocket and view it as their second camera. For when you don’t have your bulky DSLR around your neck…

HTC: That’s an interesting statement, because I think most consumers would hold up their phone and go ‘this is my first camera’. But I love the perspective, because that’s exactly where I come from with my love of the camera. I think we would love to have more dialogue with the enthusiast audience going forward. Our commitment now to imaging is growing, which is why I’m here talking to you. We’re always pulled in those different directions – asking what’s right for the mass consumer and what’s right for the enthusiast. And I think you’ll find with the M8 we’ve put a lot more tools in the enthusiast’s hands than we have before. And we’d love to have more participation with that community, open up the SDK kit and really start pushing the envelope as to what is possible photographically and in terms of cinematography. Because quality has got to the point that you can shoot 1080P video and extract stills; I, for one, come from a very stills photography orientated background, but at the same time I am starting to embrace the idea of cinematography. Some of the best cinematographers and directors started off shooting stills. Ultimately you can imagine a day when we can solve a lot of the issues involving video encoding and just extract a still from that stream. But I would never dismiss the idea of a properly composed still image. I still go back to my film cameras. It depends what you want to do with the content. The good photographers plan their shots, rather than just relying on happenstance.

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