I’ve got some questions/concerns about the Brax3 camera quality. Prefacing it with the fact I am completely new to Android, I have to say I’m disappointed with my experience of the Brax3 camera so far, and I’m not sure if I’m missing something.
Default Camera App with iodeOS:
If the camera is spec’ed at 50MP — which (per an internet search) is usually images with a resolution of 8000 x 6000 (or suffice it to say, BETTER than 4K) why would the default camera only be able to go up to 1080p FHD and?
I’ve found that the auto focus sends exposure (light distribution as affects various objects like people, carpeting, surroundings) all over the place throughout a video…. appearing normal at times, then adding extreme levels of brightness when the camera moves — depending on if there is something like an open window with incoming light. The focus itself has been incredibly hard to control, and very undesirable to use.
I also tried Open Camera, and found a couple major issues:
though the app has manually controllable focus by tapping the desired area and then locking it with a User Interface button, portions of people’ skin appear clay-like or fake as regards video definition (almost as if partially cartoonized). Hair & fabric can appear incredibly grainy and flicker/staticky/noisy even with solid colors.
the amount of light the camera picks up in a lit room using several floodlights (and even a room with some degree of natural lighting) is terrible. In one case, lights were dimmed a bit granted, but my iPhone X picked up plenty of light to properly represent what my eyes see…. Open Camera makes it look like video was shot in a poorly lit tavern before pressing the record button… and I mean *very poorly lit… like someone purposefully applied a dark filter to suck the light out of the image. If exposure isn’t locked, once recording starts, the app takes in an enormous amount of light — over-exposing the captured content. This makes it pretty much impossible to get an accurate idea of what the video exposure will actually look like.
Does anyone know of a good privacy friendly-camera app that doesn’t sacrifice good built-in exposure and is more user-friendly? I’m not a professional videographer or seeking multi-thousand dollar camera quality. It just seems like — barring my being a complete novice when it comes to Android — it should come closer to the picture/video quality of iPhones that are even several years old (iPhone X, 11, etc).
Are my expectations unrealistic?
Brax3 has two large lenses and the rear camera is 50MP, and yet an iPhone with a single 12MP (and smaller lens too) can absolutely crush it.
You need to go into the Camera Settings, under Photos, and choose the Maximum Quality. That will get you about 8000x4600, or 36Mpx
The better quality, but slower option, that you found is OpenCamera in the store. In the Settings you would enter Photo Settings, and at the top you can choose 8192x6144 for the full 50Mpx
But… to be honest, the camera and the support for pictures is not great, especially if you are coming from an iPhone or Google OS device. It’s not even close to those. In general, having a de-googled device forces some compromise, unless you get a pixel or a fairphone.
If you had a Pixel, running Iode, you could possible use the gcam or something which is a fork of Google’s camera app.
On Fairphone, you would have to run e/os, but you would get access to Fairphone’s camera app. While it’s much better, it’s not iPhone full-featured.
You need to chat with @Mycenius. I think he is also looking into this, but he’s just getting set up with his phone. I am looking into this too, but I have way less experience with cameras than Mycenius does.
I came from iPhone too. I think part of it is the lack of AI (which I’m happy not to have at any cost), but the major camera apps on mainstream phones do utilize that which makes the pictures better.
The quality of images are affected by a couple of things.
To a degree by the processing power of the CPU of the phone. Apple’s and other flagship’s CPU is significantly more powerful than BraX3’s CPU.
And most importantly - camera calibration and fine tuning. That’s more important than the MP on the camera. We’re really new to camera calibration. We’ve received a few offers from companies specializing in optimizing camera quality, but we couldn’t bare the cost - it was too high.
Camera quality is one of the areas we will be working on improving in future iterations of our products.
Sad to hear that you were not able to optimise the camera in Brax3 but I’m encouraged your looking into this for future phones, while privacy is the priority a good camera is next priority for me.
Thanks for the insight Plamen. Hopefully I didn’t come off too harsh in my initial post. I really appreciate the fact that we have Brax3 as an option at all. I’m still figuring mine out in ways; and there are things I really like about it and the Android Open Source ecosystem.
Part of my intent in saying what I did was to hopefully give voice to others who may be coming from the Apple ecosystem and are running into the same questions I have.
I hope Brax is able to coordinate and capitalize on some of those offers to improve future specs. It would be exciting to see that materialize.
As I get more involved and knowledgeable in the Open Source community, I hope to be a larger influence in driving things like this and many others.
Yes I’m going very slow @xphoenix due to limited time to spend on it and trying to be very thorough (or at least understand what I am doing) especially around non-open source apps I need to install…
Probably a bit generous
I find photography is not like riding a bike - you can’t just jump back in and immediately be up to speed again - I’ve only ever been an enthusiastic prosumer, and have now lived off my phone for 10+ years, and it’s been 12 or so since I used a DSLR…
But so far what I have gleaned from other feedback is exactly along the lines of what @xancudo has said:
You might find these interesting reading also:
Me too - the iPhone cameras in the early/mid-2010’s are why I finally dropped using a DSLR or Mirrorless camera with changeable lenses - they were good enough for most of what I then did…
Could someone upload objective (no pun) representative examples of the camera image quality? A decent camera is one thing that must work for me. People who have waited unreasonable amounts of time for their phones might as well have the opportunity to judge whether this additional compromise is a deal breaker. Thanks in advance people
For me the problem is not with the picture as much as the audio. I need to shoot videos of my BF’s bands and the audio is so poor that I simply can’t use it for that purpose.
The other thing is that the sound is bad between 2 Brax3 phones. When talking to my BF it sounds like paper is being crinkled up in the background. This is not the case for Brax3 to other phones.
Is there anything I can do to improve sound quality or is this a hardware issue that can’t be fixed?
My wide angle lense was not in focus right out of the box. There is nothing I can do to fix it. Tried numerous settings and apps. The normal lense was ok.
So I thought I’d post an update on my camera experiences and my conclusions so far - like most people I’ve had some issues with some aspects - and have been struggling to make it practical to use. Very simply I’m still getting ongoing issues with laggy slow shutter speeds, which I can only resolve fully by reducing image capture to 5MP (instead of 50MP). Also when taking 50MP images I’m also still getting variability of image quality that I can’t resolve (largely fine if outdoors in bright sunlight, everywhere else it’s not so good).
In the BraX3 phone specs for the cameras it states the Front Camera is 5MP with a GC05A2 CMOS sensor, but then for the Main Back Camera it states it is 50MP with the same GC05A2 CMOS sensor. That doesn’t make sense, unless there is a typo (which seems unlikely but is possible), because how can the same sensor be 2 radically different resolutions.
If you search this model on the web (another example, and it’s even on Amazon if you search hard enough); basically you’ll find it everywhere. And always as a 5MP sensor, sold as a low cost camera for phones, similar devices and drones - and always with more or less identical spec info. Nowhere does it appear listed as a higher resolution (at least that I could find). And I would not expect a CMOS sensor to have 2 different resolutions with the same model or part number.
Perhaps @plamen could step in here and comment or clarify - and verify it’s not a typo and the sensor models are the same (and/or are they missing a prefix or suffix to the model ID)? Or what the correct CMOS sensor model actually is if it’s a typo?
Otherwise, if it is the same sensor for both, one is then left wondering if some sort of upsampling or something is happening at image capture time on the BraX3; which could explain the lagginess of the image capture, and the variability of the image quality at 50MP? Otherwise I simply don’t understand how the same CMOS sensor can be 5MP in the front camera and yet 50MP in the rear one?
Very cool you figured that out! I’m not really in the know about cameras or photography, but this is interesting.
I have been using my camera a lot with the stock camera app. I’m compensating by shooting closer than normal or editing after shooting at a distance. It is not iPhone quality, but I expect there is a LOT of AI going on in the apple camera app that is not happening on the BraX3.
I can live with this quality. The one feature I have found I miss (on the stock app) is capturing still pictures while shooting videos. I didn’t realize how often I did that until I now cannot!
