The new "HTC ONE"

When HTC unveiled its new flagship phone, the HTC One, it set out to redefine how the smartphone cameras are measured. The most tangible spec for a camera is how many megapixels it can capture, but that spec is far from the last word on photo quality. So HTC created a new term: the UltraPixel.

The word itself is scientifically meaningless: Like, Apple's "Retina Display," UltraPixel is a marketing term that conveys a general idea rather than a unit of measurement. When it set out to build the camera for the One, HTC decided that the current standard of 8 megapixels is overkill for a phone camera. As the New York Times' David Pogue once famously pointed out, higher resolution often doesn't translate into higher quality.

"The pain point we really wanted to focus on is: Do we really want to be honest with consumers and give them the best possible photography experience, or do we do what the entire market has been doing for years on end," Chris Park, a product marketing manager at HTC, told Mashable. "UltraPixel refers to the fact that pixel size is more important than total number of pixels."

For the One, HTC actually lowered the pixel resolution of the camera to 4.3 megapixels, and instead jacked up the size of the individual pixels on the 1/3-inch image sensor. Each pixel is 2 micrometers (µm) wide; to compare, the pixels on the iPhone 5's image sensor are 1.4µm wide. HTC says that lets each pixel capture 300% more light than "traditional" phone cameras.

SEE ALSO: Hands On With the HTC One

The larger pixels, along with a large f/2.0 aperture and a dedicated image processor, theoretically should give the HTC One good low-light performance, although from our brief hands-on, it didn't work miracles: Photos of fast-moving people in a dim setting still had lots of motion blur. However, color and detail of static objects looked good.

Nonetheless, it's undeniable that photos taken with an HTC One will be lower resolution than most other flagship smartphones. HTC's reasoning appears to be that the vast majority of those photos are destined for places like Facebook and Instagram, and a 4-megapixel photo is fine for online or mobile viewing.

We'll wait until we have a chance to review the HTC One before we pass final judgment on its camera, but the shifting away from the "megapixel wars" (some of Sony's recent phones have 13MP cameras) to overall image quality is certainly a positive thing. HTC deserves credit for its approach with the One's camera, but other manufacturers (notably Nokia with PureView) have already made moves in this regard.

Are you willing to trade some resolution for a better quality overall? What would you think if Apple took the same approach with the iPhone? Share your reactions in the comments.