HTC One mini 2 Review

Outdoor Scenes (Night)

Next we transition to some shots on location. First up is the same night shot of a storefront that we used in the Galaxy S 5 review:

The mini 2 does a reasonable job of using available light here and ends up picking similar shot settings to the M8 (1/10 vs 1/11s, ISO 2000 vs. 1600 on the M8). The difference in resulting image is pretty substantial though. The M8 produces a far brighter scene. Overall the mini 2 does well here, but let's see what happens when we remove some of the direct lighting:

In true low-light situations, the mini 2 suffers considerably. Using a 1.12µm sensor with a weaker ISP (and likely weaker optics), the mini 2 loses nearly all detail in the car. You can't see into the car at all and move a little up the hood and you lose virtually all contrast. The big M8 by comparison produces an image that almost looks like it was captured under different lighting conditions (it wasn't). Most of the similarly priced competitors do better here than the mini 2. For as strong of a low light performer as the M8 is, the One mini 2 is the polar opposite. Only the Galaxy S 4 is worse.

Outdoor Scenes (Daylight)

With the worst out of the way, now it's time to see where the One mini 2 really shines compared to the One. All of the photos below were taken during the late afternoon with very little cloud cover and tons of sunlight. The M8 struggled against modern competitors in this type of a situation, but let's see how much moving to a cheaper, but higher resolution sensor can help.

Right off the bat you can see the advantage of the mini 2's higher resolution sensor. Remember the sagittal and tangential crops from earlier? Here we see those advantages play out in the real world. Detail in the horizontal lines on the building and especially in the crane is all but lost on the M8, but it's preserved on the mini 2. Although you can't see it here in this crop (check out the gallery below), there's a ton of detail in the trees in the background that's simply lost on the M8 that you regain with the mini 2.

The mini 2 does a reasonable job here compared to other similarly priced, former-flagships.

This next scene takes a different angle on the crane and mixes more subjects at varied distances from the camera:

The One mini 2's spatial resolution advantage is less pronounced here compared to the M8. We also see more pronounced differences in color handling between the two devices. It's interesting to correlate the differences we saw shooting test charts with how these devices behave in the real world.

The mini 2 does a reasonable job here as well, although some of the competitors do pull ahead.

For the last shot I'm looking at a crop of downtown Raleigh, taken from a distant bridge.

Here we have another great example of the One mini 2 outperforming the M8 when it comes to resolving fine details. I'm actually pretty pleased with the One mini 2's performance here. Interestingly enough, Apple seems to do a better job of capturing detail in the foreground at the expense of background image detail in this case.