HTC Desire 530 – Camera

Up until the 2015 edition of the Moto G I generally didn’t expect much from affordable smartphones in the camera department. But in today’s budget smartphone market, camera tech is an increasingly important area, and many sub-£200 smartphones can now offer genuinely impressive photo performance.

Here again I found the Desire 530 to be slightly disappointing.

The 8-megapixel camera’s f/2.4-aperture lens ensures shots taken on the Desire 530 in regular light are suitably sharp and have good enough colour balance to be shared on social media. But image quality is nowhere near as good as the Moto G’s.

The Desire 530 can take reasonable photos

But its shutter lag is terrible

It doesn’t deal with low- or mixed-light situations well

Even moderately challenging conditions were too much for it

The Desire 530’s performance issues also severely diminish the phone’s photographic capabilities. On too many occasions I experienced a massive delay between pressing the on-screen shutter button and an image being captured. The slow shutter speed makes shooting anything but a static subject close to impossible.

The processor also struggled to deal with the phone’s panorama shot mode, and my attempts to capture a usable photo for the review proved difficult.

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The camera’s autofocus is also fairly finicky. Shooting in anything other than bright light, the Desire 530’s camera struggles to accurately focus.

The Desire 530’s 5-megapixel front camera suffers from the same issues and has equally poor shutter speeds – which again made capturing images on it an awkward experience.