I am a new owner of the S5 and after few days of using it a couple of things bother me. Could you guys shed some light/
1. The camera sticks out in the back a bit. Does that mean that when I leave my phone on a table, desk, etc. it will scratch the camera lens and all my photos will have the scratch marks? If so, what should I do -- have a really thick and bulky case?
2. when taking photos, the 16 megapixels are only available in 16;9. But in photography, generally pictures are taken in 4:3. Unfortunately, the samsung camera is only 12 megapixels at 4:3. So, if i want to highest quality picture, I cannot take it with 4:3. What do you guys use? I mean 16:9 looks nice on a TV, but so what. In fact the biggest flaw is that the front-facing is 2 megapixel but, again, at 16:9. And a 16:9 selfie is horrible!
If the table is flat and clean it won't scratch, the other end sits lower so the entire phone is tilted lifting the lens up for a tiny bit.
Photos I just take 16:9, if you need 4:3 you can always crop it later on.
It's not clear if you are seeking pragmatic solutions or venting.
Scratching the rear camera glass is not a big concern. The rear camera glass is recessed from the bezel, so it won't be scratched if set down or even slid on a smooth surface. If you take decent care of your electronics it's not likely to get scratched. A reasonable person wouldn't set their phone down on something like a coarse stone bench.
Nor are minor scratches likely to have an obvious visible effect on photos. If you are careless with your phone, then consider a case. Or buy some spare $2 camera glass covers and replace them periodically.
If you want an old fashioned 4:3 image, just crop the 16:9 photo. Done.
If you still feel that the 16:9 format is a deal breaker, then you only have yourself to fault in not researching your purchase better in advance. A 16:9 format is pretty standard for phones and it's pretty picky to find that a serious fault. If you do, then you can look at other phones or a stand alone camera.
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fffft said:
If you want an old fashioned 4:3 image, just crop the 16:9 photo. Done.
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but S5's 4/3 FoV is so small... compared to S4 or S3
And why oh why oh why can't the 7D have a full frame sensor????
I don't really understand your complaint. You can't change the camera in the way you are wishing for, so why are you bemoaning that it is 16:9? Either the overall package makes sense to you or it doesn't. You can crop the picture or probably find an app that crops the FOV as a default setting. You say that doesn't work for you. Fine. If the camera format is a deal breaker for you, then move on and get a different phone.
Complaining that you don't like the camera specs after your purchase accomplishes nothing other than venting. If you prefer an S3 or S4 or whatever model, then why did you buy the S5? Complaining after the fact only underscores that you didn't do your due diligence. The sensible time to have weighed your objections was before you bought your S5.
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I take very good care of my electronics...and that's why I am paranoid and asking the question if I can easily scratch the camera even though I take good care since it is somewhat more exposed and sticks out. Generally, I leave my phone on its back while in the office or at home. The rest of the time -- it is in my pocket. I got an ultra slim case, which does not lift from the camera, so I was under the impression that I am not protecting the camera.
As far as the megapixels, do not get me wrong I am not complaining, rather asking what you guys are using 16:9 or 4:3. I used to be into amateur photography a couple of years ago, and back then the thing was to shoot in 4:3 always, regardless that cameras support 16:9. So, not sure of the trend has changed, and if folks using DSLRs for example are now shooting in 16:9. Now, for a selfie 16:9 is awful, but you can use an app like Retrica which always crops it to a square so no issues there.
I was just curious what people are shooting with 16 megapixel or 12.. or even less...
Related
I searched for a camera fix for the HD camera with no success. Does anyone know if there's going to be a fix in the near future? I'm sure that ya'll have the same problem that I do. Camera takes pictures that look old & rustic. Brownish tint to them & not very sharp for a 5 MP camera. I have adjusted all the settings for light & junk but nothing fixes it. As far as I'm concerned, it should take pictures IDENTICAL to a normal 5 MP digital camera. I can promise you that it's not doing that. Any help would be great, thanks in advance.
Vampire2800 said:
I searched for a camera fix for the HD camera with no success. Does anyone know if there's going to be a fix in the near future? I'm sure that ya'll have the same problem that I do. Camera takes pictures that look old & rustic. Brownish tint to them & not very sharp for a 5 MP camera. I have adjusted all the settings for light & junk but nothing fixes it. As far as I'm concerned, it should take pictures IDENTICAL to a normal 5 MP digital camera. I can promise you that it's not doing that. Any help would be great, thanks in advance.
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Why should it take pictures identical to a 5MP camera. The lens on the front is going to be vastly different, the sensor maybe 5MP, but what is the spacing on the sensor pixels? The closer together, the noisier the image. Colour balance will be down to the sensor too.
Regards
I'm not talking about the front camera. The normal camera on the back. I understand about the pixel thing, but it still shouldn't be so brownish, right? The pictures look like an old Polaroid picture. You know, the one's that spit the picture out as soon as you took it. Old, brown & nasty looking.
My pictures come out fine...
Hmmmmmmm...................... I'll just keep playing with it.
Vampire2800 said:
I'm not talking about the front camera. The normal camera on the back. I understand about the pixel thing, but it still shouldn't be so brownish, right? The pictures look like an old Polaroid picture. You know, the one's that spit the picture out as soon as you took it. Old, brown & nasty looking.
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I'm not being flippant, but is it possible you might have a dirty lens?
Lol, that was the first thing I tried. Cleaned both sides of the back cover & cleaned the lens on the camera. Good idea, though.
The "5mp" doesn't really mean much, as stated earlier, if the sensor and lens are poor quality. As far as I know, HTC haven't released a phone with a reasonable quality camera, yet.
I bounce between different smart-phones (just coming back to WM now, after a year with S60). I can say that many of the S60 devices (in particular the Nokia N95, but also the N82 with Xenon flash) have very good cameras, being similar to low-end digital cameras in daylight. They lack optical zoom and tend to over-compress images, but have good quality lenses.
imho hd camera is excelent
pictures look old & rustic only if you make them inside house without using the artificial light setting, and this is also a general rule, not specific to HD.
Never seen a good phone camera yet, including the latest 8mpixel ones. They're all terrible.
Never
This camera will NEVER take pictures anywhere near what real cameras do. The photo sites are so tiny, they are smaller then the length of waive of light. Therefore noise, lack of dynamic width, etc. No patch will ever fix that. Sorry
open back cover , clean the lens , you will see a huge difference in quality
Vampire2800 said:
Lol, that was the first thing I tried. Cleaned both sides of the back cover & cleaned the lens on the camera. Good idea, though.
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Not that I'm doubting you or anything but you do realize that the back cover only has a hole through to the lens?
You might try setting the brightness higher:
If you touch the small rectangle near the bottom right side of the screen (when holding landscape)
Then select the gear symbol, then select brightness from the menu and hit the "+" until it looks better that will remove most of the darkness.
The camera is a plain disappointment. In the time the camera autofocusses, I could have bought a Sony Ericsson C905's, create a good looking photo (with xenon flash) and upload it to imageshack.
If 'your object' makes the slightest move, your photo will be blurry . This is also the case when you attempt to make a photo of someone that isn't aware he or she has to be waiting for the autofocus lag. Head moves >>> blurry pic.
iPhone camera shots are way better quality, don't ask me why. Overall my Touch HD scores 8/10, where atleast 1 full point is taken up by the camera
and it's better don't speak about the very laggy video recording
mach03 said:
iPhone camera shots are way better quality, don't ask me why.
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Too many megapixels on a tiny sensor = major noise problem = blurring from denoise.
Even 2mpixels is too much for sensors this size, but people buy on marketing numbers of megapixels, not quality. You can just imagine the whining that would occur if the Touch HD came out with 1.3mpxiels, even though it would produce better pictures.
arfster said:
Too many megapixels on a tiny sensor = major noise problem = blurring from denoise.
Even 2mpixels is too much for sensors this size, but people buy on marketing numbers of megapixels, not quality. You can just imagine the whining that would occur if the Touch HD came out with 1.3mpxiels, even though it would produce better pictures.
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hehe, thats true.
mpixels dont count as much as the general public belives. the more mpix. the higher rezolution you can print the picture in. but for ordinary photos, 1.3 mpix would be enough, as long as the optics is good.
Personally, I rarely use a phone camera.
I use either my Olympus 720SW or Canon EOS.
the camera sucks **** compared to the n95 and the video recording is horrid. i know it's not meant to be as good as a dedicated camera but this is pretty bad given the price of the device.
i concur with mach03, move the camera a slight bit and eveyrthing gets blurred. one way i've semi gotten aorund this is to unlock the burst functiona nd take a sequence of pics and hope one or two coems out alright, not the most economic way to do it though...
i would ahve thought that maybe there's a way to tweak the camera to stop the blurring or even affect how much light is picked up by the lens which should also help with clarity
Vampire2800 said:
I'm not talking about the front camera. The normal camera on the back. I understand about the pixel thing, but it still shouldn't be so brownish, right? The pictures look like an old Polaroid picture. You know, the one's that spit the picture out as soon as you took it. Old, brown & nasty looking.
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A silly idea, but seriously, did you check if maybe, just maybe, you left the "sepia" effect turned on???
I like to take pictures of menus when I go to restaurants because I am very indecisive and don't want to get in anyone's way. I find my Note 2 to be sorely lacking in capturing letters on a wall though. The attached pic is a crop of the best pic out of half a dozen. If you try hard enough you could make out most of the words...barely. It came from a portrait pic since the landscape ones are just blurry messes and holding it upright with one hand is way more secure. The place was very well lit and bright too.
Do you think the 13MP camera on the S4 will do any better than this?
A million samples here:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2213853
Yes, it is a major step-up, whether it's good enough for you it up to your judgement. The Lumia 920 is still better in low-light.
Hi there, not sure if this is a common problem or not.
Whenever I take a photo on the phone it appears okay, but when I start to zoom in it comes out really blurry. The camera's set to 13mp and even on 9.6 it's blurry too. Is it like this for everyone?
Welcome to the primary drawback of digital zoom.
Sent from my GT-I9505 using xda app-developers app
The quality will get more poor whenever you zoom in. I haven't had any issues with poor quality while zooming yet, but I'll have an eye open for it.
Pagnell said:
Welcome to the primary drawback of digital zoom.
Sent from my GT-I9505 using xda app-developers app
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Haha, I meant after I'd taken the picture. Back when I owned an iPhone 4 a couple years ago, zooming in after taking the picture was still crystal clear, and that was only a 5 megapixel camera..
samb222 said:
Haha, I meant after I'd taken the picture. Back when I owned an iPhone 4 a couple years ago, zooming in after taking the picture was still crystal clear, and that was only a 5 megapixel camera..
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Well... I think I get what you mean, and it has to do mainly with the resolution of the screen. When visualising pictures in a FullHD screen (2MP) the available real size is "only" 2.5times the display size on each direction. (Screen is ~2kx1k, 13MP is ~5kx2.5k pixels). And when you zoom in you quickly reach (and surpass) the real (sharp) size.
With an old phone (say 800x480) you had plenty of zooming to do before reaching the 5MP size.
The complementary reason to this is that the camera 13MP sensor is not proportionally sized with respect to good 8MP ones.
Having said all this, I find the quality of the S4 pictures to be OUTSTANDING for a mobile device.
pintycar said:
Well... I think I get what you mean, and it has to do mainly with the resolution of the screen. When visualising pictures in a FullHD screen (2MP) the available real size is "only" 2.5times the display size on each direction. (Screen is ~2kx1k, 13MP is ~5kx2.5k pixels). And when you zoom in you quickly reach (and surpass) the real (sharp) size.
With an old phone (say 800x480) you had plenty of zooming to do before reaching the 5MP size.
The complementary reason to this is that the camera 13MP sensor is not proportionally sized with respect to good 8MP ones.
Having said all this, I find the quality of the S4 pictures to be OUTSTANDING for a mobile device.
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Ah that makes more sense, thanks
Which mode/settings do you use? My pictures are good but nothing spectacular.
samb222 said:
Ah that makes more sense, thanks
Which mode/settings do you use? My pictures are good but nothing spectacular.
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I usually leave it on Auto Mode although some times I do have to lower the ISO level because it tends to like high ISO values unnecessarily. I'm not a Pro photographer though.. there's probably some thread about tips and tricks to get the best out of it.
Thanks.
Post a full res picture here so we can see if they're ok.
exec99 said:
Post a full res picture here so we can see if they're ok.
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This picture came out surprisingly well for a change haha. Still interested on your opinions though
Have you removed the plastic lens protector?. To do so, remove the back plate and proceed carefully with your fingernail
inolvidable said:
Have you removed the plastic lens protector?. To do so, remove the back plate and proceed carefully with your fingernail
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Yep, removed it
I'm getting lots of softness and graininess on the front camera.
I'm having the same problems with the front camera. It's so frustrating as it didn't happen with the S2!!
Why is 16:9 Ratio locked to 12MP? When the main camera is 16MP, 4:3 Aspect Ratio can go up to 16MP, so why can't 16:9? And could somebody possibly develop a mod to allow 16:9 to take full capability of the camera, I would try but I don't know how to, just a question I thought I'd ask, thanks in advance for replies
Joe199799 said:
Why is 16:9 Ratio locked to 12MP? When the main camera is 16MP, 4:3 Aspect Ratio can go up to 16MP, so why can't 16:9? And could somebody possibly develop a mod to allow 16:9 to take full capability of the camera, I would try but I don't know how to, just a question I thought I'd ask, thanks in advance for replies
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16:9 just isn't a thing for 16MP. On any camera really. I'd try to explain it but I'm bad at explaining so I'll try to summarize (or at least how I like to think of it, someone can correct me). Think of megapixel as a large portion of a photo. When you have 12 it's basically 4 megapixels across and 3 megapixels tall, making 12. 16 just adds 4 more to the top or bottom row of the photo. So it's not a limitation of the phone, just of cameras in general.
Thisisabadname said:
16:9 just isn't a thing for 16MP. On any camera really. I'd try to explain it but I'm bad at explaining so I'll try to summarize (or at least how I like to think of it, someone can correct me). Think of megapixel as a large portion of a photo. When you have 12 it's basically 4 megapixels across and 3 megapixels tall, making 12. 16 just adds 4 more to the top or bottom row of the photo. So it's not a limitation of the phone, just of cameras in general.
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The 16:9 (12MP) Toggle comes enabled on the phone out of the box (at least I think it does) (and if not, the stock rom I'm using, the Creator might have switched it, but it's not mentioned anywhere else in his thread) and 4:3 (16MP) won't let a picture fill the screen completely, I know MP isn't everything when it comes to a camera, but it's just odd that it's a 16MP main sensor with it only using 12 of 16 out of the box, it's possible I'm not comprehending this and all the last phones I've had (GS6 and LG G5) Both have had camera mods that's gave them 60FPS recordings, improvements in general, and 100% JPG Quality, I appreciate your answer, and as I've said I might be just not grasping it or not understanding the reasoning behind it, just was digging around the stock camera app came upon the setting and thought I'd ask people that know more about this stuff then me. Thank you.
It's a hardware sensor limitation in the 16mp camera for the LG V20, and while you could get an app on the market that takes 16:9 pictures on the v20 by stretching the 4:3 picture to fit the ratio, I would just accept what we have ATM considering the alternative is kinda harmful to image fidelity
EDIT: Yes there is an option to switch to 16:9 with the drop to 12mp/6-mp depending on the options you choose obviously (just looked thanks to the post Joe199799 made just before mine)
This "degradation" in Megapixel count is actually fairly normal and happens in most cameras. My previous phone had a 13MP camera but recorded 9.7MP 16:9 shots. Here's a detailed explanation for why this happens:
If you think about how a camera works, light passes through the lens to hit the sensor. Making this lens round is the easiest option to make the image projected onto the sensor as close to reality without any distortion. Making the lens another shape would distort the image, ab bit like using the wide angle camera does, which is difficult to correct in post.
The lens projects a circular image, which you want to record as much of as possible. A circular sensor could capture everything, but circular content on rectangular screens doesn't make much sense.
The next shape that takes up the most area within a circle is a square. But at the time digital image sensors were developed, computer screens had adopted ratios of 4:3 or 3:2, slight deviations from the square.
As a result, image sensors were also built in 4:3 ratios, which sacrifice some, but not too much of the entire projected image. Now, with screen ratios favouring more width, we could adapt our sensors, however, to capture images of comparable quality, lenses would have to become larger or sensor electronics would need to shrink. Neither option is particularly preferable, which is why the 4:3 ratio has stuck around and most cameras recording 16:9 images simply crop out part of a 4:3 image. Because it arguably makes sense, megapixel count refers to the entire area of the image sensor. By cropping the image, the megapixel count will obviously decrease as a certain amount of pixels is deleted.
Alexsp32 said:
This "degradation" in Megapixel count is actually fairly normal and happens in most cameras. My previous phone had a 13MP camera but recorded 9.7MP 16:9 shots. Here's a detailed explanation for why this happens:
If you think about how a camera works, light passes through the lens to hit the sensor. Making this lens round is the easiest option to make the image projected onto the sensor as close to reality without any distortion. Making the lens another shape would distort the image, ab bit like using the wide angle camera does, which is difficult to correct in post.
The lens projects a circular image, which you want to record as much of as possible. A circular sensor could capture everything, but circular content on rectangular screens doesn't make much sense.
The next shape that takes up the most area within a circle is a square. But at the time digital image sensors were developed, computer screens had adopted ratios of 4:3 or 3:2, slight deviations from the square.
As a result, image sensors were also built in 4:3 ratios, which sacrifice some, but not too much of the entire projected image. Now, with screen ratios favouring more width, we could adapt our sensors, however, to capture images of comparable quality, lenses would have to become larger or sensor electronics would need to shrink. Neither option is particularly preferable, which is why the 4:3 ratio has stuck around and most cameras recording 16:9 images simply crop out part of a 4:3 image. Because it arguably makes sense, megapixel count refers to the entire area of the image sensor. By cropping the image, the megapixel count will obviously decrease as a certain amount of pixels is deleted.
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Thank you for the explanation it's very through and fleshed out, I think I understand now
hey guys
I have seen this problem in my xc rear camera photos and also in one my friends' xc, so I was wondering if there is a fix or if it is hardware issue or software related,
photos taken by rear camera seem to stretch the sides of the picture and also are a little blurry in sides
for example if you take a picture of a bunch of people standing next to each other, you notice that faces in the sides of the picture are a little stretched and not in real size!!!
Kianush said:
hey guys
I have seen this problem in my xc rear camera photos and also in one my friends' xc, so I was wondering if there is a fix or if it is hardware issue or software related,
photos taken by rear camera seem to stretch the sides of the picture and also are a little blurry in sides
for example if you take a picture of a bunch of people standing next to each other, you notice that faces in the sides of the picture are a little stretched and not in real size!!!
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I have noticed the same thing. In portrait photos too the heads look stretched vertically. Not happy at all. I'm going to be selling this phone. To be honest my old Xperia Z took better portrait photos than this one.
This is mostly due to the optics of such a small image sensor and super small flat plane lens atop the camera. Anytime the focal length and the lens curvature are not perfect you get some blurring, and they are only perfect at a single point in any camera systems range of focus.
The stretching of the sides is due to the super short focal length/wide angle lens. Same issue happens if you stick a 14mm close up/fisheye lens on a slr camera. This portion of the problem is often corrected for in higher end cameras with software, Sony recently pushed an update to other xperia phones with the same or similar camera to run the algorithm to correct the un-equal representation.
Compounding the issue :
Smaller flat plane optics cause a lot of chromatic abortion as you radiate out, it's the worst in the corners. This gives it a vignette style are of focus and is just not avoidable either.
Sony made the choice to do a lot of image smoothing to hide their noisy camera and it also happens to hide the abortion as a blur effect. I'd rather have the abortion personally than loosing details in a blur.