Name: Desire 610
Brand: HTC

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Camera

HTC places a big emphasis on the imaging capability of its devices. The camera app on the Desire 610 is very good and helps you get the most from the 8MP camera on the back.

Taking pictures at the highest resolution - which is not the default setting - means using a 4:3 aspect ratio. Luckily the camera app properly frames the viewfinder. By default, a 16:9 crop is selected.

HTC Desire 610 review — There are three photography modes: camera, video and selfie

There are three modes on offer, camera (which is the normal shooting mode), video and selfie. There are some extensive settings available too, including a wide range of scene selections with the option for HDR, some level of control over the ISO, exposure compensation and white balance.

Once some combination of these has been chosen, they can be saved as a custom camera mode accessible very quickly through the mode selection button in the bottom left corner.

Like most HTC phones, the camera on the Desire 610 is very fast to start up and pleasingly brisk when capturing images. Shutter speed is excellent for a device of this price.

The gallery app is excellent, giving you a default view of your images grouped by when they were taken. HTC calls these views your timeline, and for each of them a highlights video set to music is automatically generated.

The highlights videos have various effects applied to them, and the cuts between pictures and videos are timed to the music you select. There are 12 different options here and you can also choose your own music.

There's a lot of fun to be had with these videos, and once you're happy with your setup, they can be shared via email.

Unfortunately, image quality disappoints, with noise appearing even in bright daylight shots and a muddy, soft output in anything approaching lower light. In fact, some shots manage to be both overly soft and very noisy at the same time.

Whenever a bright light is present, the camera massively over exposes that area, it simply refuses to balance the exposure for bright light properly. Using the reasonably good HDR mode helps, but it is rather slow to process. The flash is quite weak as well but it does cast an even light.