Help Camera

[Xenon]

Today I went out, turned on GPS and a tracking app and took some 150
pictures before the battery died. I'm going over them now, adding tags and
so on, and I can say that my initial impression that the camera is crap is now
different.

Perhaps it was because I took my first photos in really bad weather and
today it was sunny, I don't know, but now photos seem decent. Not great,
but OK. The lens and the sensor seem to be able to catch an acceptable
level of detail.

The biggest problem is that the images are overexposed. I found that I can
fix some of it using Picasa's one-click postprocessing.

When using low end cameras I make it a point to help it as much as I can, so
I often try to steady the camera by putting it on some flat surface, like a car
roof or a bench or something. This doesn't work well with Galaxy because the
volume rocker is in the way.

What are your comments on the Camera now that you have used it a bit?

 

[informale]

Bloody awful in any weather, i.e. lighting conditions.

 

[ch424]

Mine has terrible trouble with exposure too: If I'm indoors where there's bright fluorescent lighting (any really well-light room like an office or lab) it over exposes. If I'm indoors with the lights off, good natural lighting, it turns the flash on and under-exposes. If I'm outdoors in daylight, or indoors when the flash is actually needed, it seems fine though. I'm using the O2 I4 firmware.

 

[Carl C]

you took 150 Photo's taken on a full battery before it cut out?

 

[ch424]

Carl, remember he would have had the GPS and phone network running too. How many hours were you taking photos for?

 

[Xenon]

The battery wasn't full, it was perhaps at 60%. I don't remember.
I went for a walk that took about 1 h : 15 min.

I actually expected it to last a bit longer... but given how innacurate
the battery meter is, I think that battery wasn't really at 60%... more
like 30%.

One thing I noticed is that apparently heading isn't added to the EXIF info.
By heading I mean the compass heading, ie the direction camera is facing. It
would be great if they added it in some future patch.

Here is an example picture taken (not touched except adding tags):

 

[Xenon]

The method I use is I start MyTracks (Google's application for logging the
coordinates) which also starts the GPS and acquires the signal.

Then I run Camera and take photos. I don't exit the Camera app when I
continue walking, I just turn off the screen. Perhaps exiting the application
and re-entering it only when taking pictures would save battery.

 

[Xenon]

One more thing. The level of processing that the phone applies to the images
seems (judging by the difference between the sharpness of the image that is
displayed and the image that is saved) rather high. I don't know whether this
is just my subjective impression, but it seems like detail is lost in the process.

Also, keep in mind that even though I am not as unhappy with images taken in
good weather as I was with those taken in bad weather, this phone still takes
pictures that can't even come near the quality of those taken with (now ancient)
3.2 megapixel SE K800i.

 

[spottyelephant]

That's not a bad quality photo though. You can see the detail between blades of grass. Agreed the camera isnt up to the standard of my n95, but i still find that there aren't many occassions where it takes as good a quality photo as i need. The camcorder unfortunately though harks back to the days of very early camera phones, with sound like a 64bit rate youtube video!

 

[pegasus21]

Yep I'm getting a lot of details lost in my pictures too. I wasn't sure if it was the postprocessing or compression. Anyhow I've long since given up on it.

 

[mrqs]

could the postprocessing be circumvented with a 3rd party camera app or is it welded together with the picture-taking-function?