HTC One M8, the brand new smartphone, is making all the noises. With its chic design, the quality build, the renewed Sense 6 software and its performance, HTC One M8 is a winning combination. But HTC One M8 is not flawless.

There is one lousy entity about this handset that requires immediate attention from HTC to potentially tap the market. The worst thing about HTC's new flagship phone is its "camera."

The previous year's model from HTC had the same issue. HTC One M8's camera is not up to the mark when compared to other smartphone rivals.

Like Apple, HTC stayed away from the megapixel war. It is alright as long as the picture quality is compounded with software enhancements.

Apple iPhone 5S houses an 8 MP camera, arguably one of the best cameras among the frontrunners. The smartphone has the capacity to capture images that are sharper and refined than their counterparts' devices which have the capacity to take much bigger pictures. But the same is not true with HTC One M8, according to BGR.

The color quality of the photos taken with the HTC One M8′s camera looked wornout, sluggish and that not sharp. The picture clarity is not up to the mark either. A full-sized picture taken by the new HTC One M8 showed hazy edges and completely muffled, as reported.

HTC's camera software Sense 6 is tremendous. Sense 6 introduced great new effects with its new "Duo Camera," which uses a secondary rear-facing camera to garner in-depth detail while the primary rear camera captures the image as a whole.

HTC's automatic "bokeh effect," which adds blurring/hazy effect to the background of a photo along with the ability to refocus photos, is clearly a stunning feature.

To use all these exceptional features of Sense 6, the camera should be good enough. But the quality of photos and videos captured by HTC One M8's Duo Camera just doesn't cut it.

Smartphone cameras are way too essential to the overall handset experience and the camera on the HTC One M8 is deficient. Cameras are a deciding factor or even deal breakers in many cases.

Today, people rely on their smartphones as their sole cameras and "selfies" are ruling the roost.

In the advent of photosharing sites like Instagram, Vine, Snapchat and even Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus are increasingly making the users cling onto their smartphones and exhibit every minute of their life to the world with their cameras.

As other smartphone vendors/competitors are adding new camera features, improving their pixel counts, enhancing the hardware and image quality, HTC did not make much progress in this area. With the brand new HTC One M8, HTC should have improved their phone camera to bring down the gap between its rivals in this particular department.

It would be interesting to see how HTC One M8 fares among the other smartphones in 2014.