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Camera exposure and response time

I find the camera takes darker pictures, especially in low light, compared to Note 5 (underexposed perhaps? Not a photography buff at all . Also, the snapping pictures in general seems to be slower vs. Note 5.
Any suggestions?
I currently have both 6p and Note 5 and truly find the Note 5 to have an all-around better camera. 6p but bad by any means, but tough comparing to Note 5.

Been comparing to a friend's note 5.
The note seems to overexpose a tad in lower light.
6p seems like it's a tad darker around the edges, but for the most part is a better match to what the eye sees.
Hdr+ balances everything out, and should be used whenever possible - like always.
It works wonders. This coming from an amateur photographer, well, I have been paid for my work, but I still consider myself an amateur - even after 35+ years of playing with cameras.

Phazmos said:
Been comparing to a friend's note 5.
The note seems to overexpose a tad in lower light.
6p seems like it's a tad darker around the edges, but for the most part is a better match to what the eye sees.
Hdr+ balances everything out, and should be used whenever possible - like always.
It works wonders. This coming from an amateur photographer, well, I have been paid for my work, but I still consider myself an amateur - even after 35+ years of playing with cameras.
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Click to collapse
Agree with your assessment. Note 5 can tend to overexpose slightly in low light but overall I find Note 5 pics to be a bit clearer in low light. Even with hdr auto on both. Also agree the 6p tends to be darker around the edges. Biggest concern I have with 6p is length of time to focus/snap picture. Seems far longer than Note 5...

lp1527 said:
Agree with your assessment. Note 5 can tend to overexpose slightly in low light but overall I find Note 5 pics to be a bit clearer in low light. Even with hdr auto on both. Also agree the 6p tends to be darker around the edges. Biggest concern I have with 6p is length of time to focus/snap picture. Seems far longer than Note 5...
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Click to collapse
Only been playing with the new 6p for a couple days, but so far it seems pretty instantaneous.
Point, click, there's a picture - and in focus.
Been very very happy with the camera so far.

With HDR off the shutter is crazy fast, pretty much instantaneous. I keep auto HDR on because the HDR on this phone creates truly amazing results. If your phone is shooting HDR there is a little bit of a lag when taking a photo but not terrible. I'll take the slight lag of the HDR because the increased image quality far outweighs it.
As for underexposing images, I don't think there is any issue there. Keep in mind that the screen on the 6p is calibrated very differently than most devises. I notice images look underexposed on my phone's screen but on a computer screen or another device they look fine. I have adaptive display on so it is dimming the screen making the image look darker than it really is.
Look at the histogram of the photos if you want to see the dynamic range and the actual exposure info. In low light my 6p is very good figuring out the exposure. The histogram is obviously on the darker side if I take a photo in low light but there isn't any clipping at all under reasonable low-light. In extreme situations, like a photo in the middle of the night with only one light source, then the shadows clip but they would with any camera. What is really impressive is the lack of noise!! Usually when you have full black on a cell phone pic you get a ton of noise but the 6p is pretty good at just letting it go black rather than trying to overexpose.
The dynamic range with the HDR on is really impressive. Even extreme contrast like indoor photos with a bright window in the background won't clip in the highlights.
I am having a blast testing the limits of this camera.

nonnasmyladie said:
With HDR off the shutter is crazy fast, pretty much instantaneous. I keep auto HDR on because the HDR on this phone creates truly amazing results. If your phone is shooting HDR there is a little bit of a lag when taking a photo but not terrible. I'll take the slight lag of the HDR because the increased image quality far outweighs it.
As for underexposing images, I don't think there is any issue there. Keep in mind that the screen on the 6p is calibrated very differently than most devises. I notice images look underexposed on my phone's screen but on a computer screen or another device they look fine. I have adaptive display on so it is dimming the screen making the image look darker than it really is.
Look at the histogram of the photos if you want to see the dynamic range and the actual exposure info. In low light my 6p is very good figuring out the exposure. The histogram is obviously on the darker side if I take a photo in low light but there isn't any clipping at all under reasonable low-light. In extreme situations, like a photo in the middle of the night with only one light source, then the shadows clip but they would with any camera. What is really impressive is the lack of noise!! Usually when you have full black on a cell phone pic you get a ton of noise but the 6p is pretty good at just letting it go black rather than trying to overexpose.
The dynamic range with the HDR on is really impressive. Even extreme contrast like indoor photos with a bright window in the background won't clip in the highlights.
I am having a blast testing the limits of this camera.
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Click to collapse
Can you please explain to me the slowest shutter time of the nexus 6p with a third party app? Currently I have a Oneplus 2 and I can get up to 30 seconds which is a lot. My Oneplus 1 even had 60 seconds. Can I have these values with the nexus 6p or through a mod?
Thanks

Post pictures taken with your XL

Couldn't find a thread that has a collection of people's photos, so here we are

Nice photos, I've taken a few so far and have to say I'm pretty impressed!

Sent from my Pixel XL using XDA-Developers mobile app

Took this one yesterday afternoon (used lens blur)

Shot a few more today, mushrooms were shot in very low light but have come out pretty nicely. Auto on for all shots, not been touched in anyway.

http://www.androidpolice.com/2016/1...flare-issue-will-use-magical-mathematics-fix/

The whiskey/water was the first pic I took on the phone. I used the built in blur feature for it.
Other than the first pic, with the blur, non of these pics have been touched or edited in any way.
Shot of the drinks and dogs are in fairly normal lighting.
I was at a huge all weekend concert this last weekend and these are two of my favorites.
Stage and the sky were taken around/just after dusk.
Close up of the stage was pitch black outside. Not zoomed in, just how close I was to the stage (seeing Tool for the second time ).

Sent from my Pixel XL using XDA-Developers mobile app

Here are some low-light photos for your scrutinization pleasure. . .

And some more. Took multiples of the pirate skeleton for comparison purposes.

Had anyone tried taking a photosphere yet, I tried it earlier and it is incredible how well the phone can stick together a full spherical photo, it is going to look stunning with the daydream headset on!

One of mine.

Just a quick shot of a bubble.

The picture with the cats is in low light. The other was in my parents bathroom.

Drive to work and casserole for our potluck today

Took these today.
Sent from my Pixel XL using XDA Labs

One original and then the snapseed edited version. I do love this phone!

Playing with lens blur.

These are two of my favourites so far. No editing or filters. Just point and shoot

Took the kids to a Halloween event at the zoo today.

V20 Bug - Purple Shadow when Taking Night Pics with Wide Lens

Hi Everyone,
Have a look at attached example image to see what I mean.
Please try to take a manual shot with your wide lens in a very dark environment with very high ISO (3200 in example) and exposure time of 5secs plus (20 secs in example).
Everyone who has tried that so far has the same issue, a big purple shadow on the top. It's most likely the laser and it won't happen with the normal lense.
Do you have the same result? Any suggestions what we can do about it?

Whoa! I haven't seen that in a long time. I think maybe around the time of the Nikon D80. I can't currently try this out personally but by the sounds of it what has happened is called Amp Glow. It's when you kind of start getting out of the bounds of what is really acceptable shooting conditions for a given sensor. In this case, if you really are shooting in conditions that call for high ISO AND still need a shutter speed of 20 seconds and the image still comes out that dark, then you're way beyond realistic expectations for shooting with a cellphone. In the older DSLRs, people would see it when doing star trail photos that were 10 minutes or longer. Frame stacking software became the solution to this problem by taking a lot of shorter photos and stacking them up and pulling through the new dots of light. (And this is still used by a lot of photographers as it also gets rid of other forms of noise.)
So what is happening? ISO is pretty much the gain. It's the amplification being applied to the signal coming off of the sensor. Ideally with ANY camera, you want to stay as close to the base ISO of a given sensor. That's usually the lowest ISO number. (There are some exceptions where some camera manufacturers have done some trickery to get a lower ISO to show up but that was short lived as it didn't really help things.) Unfortunately, image sensors are not hanging in space. They're packed in with a ton of other stuff. Stuff that gets warm. If that stuff is near an edge of the sensor, that heat bleeds into the sensor and then those warmed pixels get amplified by the higher ISO and next thing you know, Amp Glow. Well, that's the simplified version at least.
A cellphone, any cellphone, is not designed for those kinds of shots. If they were, they would have a tripod mount, a much better flash, and a much larger sensor. (Yeah, the flash on your cellphone is not meant to light up stuff much past 5 feet. Even the ones built into a DSLR aren't meant for much past about 15-20 feet.) The reality is that cellphones are designed for handheld shots with decent light. Even the larger sensor used in some cellphones shouldn't be expected to pull any miracles that top end DSLRs are just barely pulling off cleanly. For that shot, you would want to use a dedicated camera locked down on a tripod using base ISO and long exposure at the very least. Although, personally, I'd probably just take a pass on that shot.

someone on reddit has the exam same issue with the wide angle. and someone said it's in the regular too. weird. my s7 never had this purple hue when I did even 30 second exposure at night.
Sent from my LG V20 US996

something obstructing the lens maybe, or just camera went bad

Better hope this isn't the same problem the HTC one m7 had with the purple haze. The culprit was a light sensor on the camera would overhear and give a purple haze on the screen in low light. Place the phone face down and with the camera on and see if the purple comes back.
Sent from my LG-H910 using Tapatalk

Dark Jedi said:
Better hope this isn't the same problem the HTC one m7 had with the purple haze. The culprit was a light sensor on the camera would overhear and give a purple haze on the screen in low light. Place the phone face down and with the camera on and see if the purple comes back.
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Click to collapse
No, it won't happen with the same ISO/Shutter settings I took the previously attached photo. But maybe that's because it's not dark enough. Did the M7 issue only happen in dark enviornment as well?
CHH2 said:
Whoa! I haven't seen that in a long time. I think maybe around the time of the Nikon D80. I can't currently try this out personally but by the sounds of it what has happened is called Amp Glow. It's when you kind of start getting out of the bounds of what is really acceptable shooting conditions for a given sensor. In this case, if you really are shooting in conditions that call for high ISO AND still need a shutter speed of 20 seconds and the image still comes out that dark, then you're way beyond realistic expectations for shooting with a cellphone. In the older DSLRs, people would see it when doing star trail photos that were 10 minutes or longer. Frame stacking software became the solution to this problem by taking a lot of shorter photos and stacking them up and pulling through the new dots of light. (And this is still used by a lot of photographers as it also gets rid of other forms of noise.)
So what is happening? ISO is pretty much the gain. It's the amplification being applied to the signal coming off of the sensor. Ideally with ANY camera, you want to stay as close to the base ISO of a given sensor. That's usually the lowest ISO number. (There are some exceptions where some camera manufacturers have done some trickery to get a lower ISO to show up but that was short lived as it didn't really help things.) Unfortunately, image sensors are not hanging in space. They're packed in with a ton of other stuff. Stuff that gets warm. If that stuff is near an edge of the sensor, that heat bleeds into the sensor and then those warmed pixels get amplified by the higher ISO and next thing you know, Amp Glow. Well, that's the simplified version at least.
A cellphone, any cellphone, is not designed for those kinds of shots. If they were, they would have a tripod mount, a much better flash, and a much larger sensor. (Yeah, the flash on your cellphone is not meant to light up stuff much past 5 feet. Even the ones built into a DSLR aren't meant for much past about 15-20 feet.) The reality is that cellphones are designed for handheld shots with decent light. Even the larger sensor used in some cellphones shouldn't be expected to pull any miracles that top end DSLRs are just barely pulling off cleanly. For that shot, you would want to use a dedicated camera locked down on a tripod using base ISO and long exposure at the very least. Although, personally, I'd probably just take a pass on that shot.
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Click to collapse
Thanks a lot for the detailed explanation. My question here would be, why doesn't it happen to other phone-cameras with similar settings?

Kujoja said:
No, it won't happen with the same ISO/Shutter settings I took the previously attached photo. But maybe that's because it's not dark enough. Did the M7 issue only happen in dark enviornment as well?
Thanks a lot for the detailed explanation. My question here would be, why doesn't it happen to other phone-cameras with similar settings?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yes the m7 only happened in low light / dark environment. Do a Google search for HTC one m7 purple haze. What caused me not to buy another htc phone
Sent from my LG-H910 using Tapatalk

Kujoja said:
No, it won't happen with the same ISO/Shutter settings I took the previously attached photo. But maybe that's because it's not dark enough. Did the M7 issue only happen in dark enviornment as well?
Thanks a lot for the detailed explanation. My question here would be, why doesn't it happen to other phone-cameras with similar settings?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Settings aren't the only part of the equation. The other par is the placement of other components within the device. I need to look at the tear downs to see how the various parts are placed next to each other but something is heating up and passing that heat to the sensor. Just off the top of my head there are four parts together; the two camera sensors, the laser focus module, and the flask module. Each one of those on its own will generate heat if used enough.
Dark Jedi said:
Yes the m7 only happened in low light / dark environment. Do a Google search for HTC one m7 purple haze. What caused me not to buy another htc phone
Sent from my LG-H910 using Tapatalk
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
It's the same issue. I haven't looked at the HTC issue but from your description of it, it's the same. Amp glow is what it is called in digital photography. (OK, silly that I said digital as you don't get amp glow in film.) The glow will show up because there is no other data coming off of the sensor for those pixels and the heat is amplified as "data".
---------- Post added at 05:15 PM ---------- Previous post was at 04:59 PM ----------
Ok, just watched the JerryRigEverything repair tear down. The flash module sits right next to the wide angle and the laser focus next to the regular sensor. There is no mention as to what is sitting next to the sensors on the main board but I see silver boxes on each side with one having some sort of black and yellow warning sticker. Not sure what they are so I can't rope them in as culprits. So for now, I'd say it's a combo of the four units of the camera assembly.
Were you running the flash or one of the cameras a lot while you were playing around? Shooting a lot of long exposure shots in a row?
I'll get to test out some night shots and video tonight at a lighting ceremony but I'm still not expecting to shoot 3200 for 20 seconds type shots. Again, that's pretty extreme.

[Camera Review] - The Unassuming Bea5T

I expected a decent camera (having used a 3t before) and back then 3t could hold its own 70% of the time against the S7edge and iPhones, but had lacked the oomph/wow factor in the images it produced. The 5t is a huge improvement over 3t (I guess this is due to the fact that i did not use op5). The images are crisp, well lit and razer sharp in good to average lighting conditions. More often than not I have been mighty impressed with the OOB images from the camera and I have not been editing them on snapseed because I didn't feel the need to - thats a testament to the camera processing on this phone (OnePlus has come a long way here).
Note: Click on the images to view full size versions of them. All images posted here are straight out of the camera without any editing/post-processing done to them.
Good lighting:
Moderate/Tricky Lighting and conditions:
I expected things to go down south as it did on the 3T on similar lighting conditions. Seattle is a particularly tricky place to get good evening shots as its mostly grey and gloomy and camera's dynamic range becomes a big factor when shooting in Seattle. The camera did a good job detecting the need for HDR on the streetcar shot below (It notifies on the camera UI that its using HDR). Given the gloomy and dim conditions I was very impressed with the picture. I was unsure about composition when the streetcar was moving so I long pressed the shutter - With HDR on, it took about 4 shots in very quick succession (Thats impressive speed, slightly better than S7edge camera). The other 2 images below are in bright to moderately dim indoor conditions with multiple colorful stuff in the frame to meter. I have to admit that in indoor warm lighting the blue tones take a serious hit and ends up grey-er than normal. On the 3rd image below there was so many small tiny details on those objects and I was blown away by the sharpness and details on that image given that the lighting was only moderate.
Low Light and severely-low/dark lighting conditions:
I did read the op5 reviews early on and part of the reason why i skipped that was due to the low light camera performance (and lack of 18:9 screen). I wouldn't say they have blown me away here but I was getting more wow-worthy images out of this camera setup than the previous oneplus phones. 7/10 times I ended up not having to re-shoot the image or edit for sharpness and noise reduction. The first image below is a 7 AM (yeah thats how Seattle is in the morning) night lit building shot of the amazon bioshperes - the shot came out very very sharp and with excellent details. The lights were too bright so I am not surprised by the blown highlight spots, but the details on the greens/plants inside could have been better.
The next 2 images were taken in very poor lighting conditions. The first one is from under the kitchen cabinet where its the darkest corner and I know there is nothing going on here, but this is was shot i was MOST impressed with from this camera. there was absolutely no light in there but the outcome was a very pleasingly clear and crisp/usable image of my shiny cookie jar and hot chocolate cups.
The last one below is a photo with a faint one LED light source on a toy, i have linked the full lighting image for comparison of colors on the toy - in short: yeah it does better, but image processing needs lot of work on super dark conditions color noise and smudgy artifacts are visible.
Regular lighting shot of the above toy for comparison: https://i.imgur.com/cM9dPnMh.jpg
Portrait mode and Macro:
This is an exciting feature and I was completely not expecting such results (DSLR-esque bokeh). Granted this is my first portrait mode equipped camera phone (as a daily driver), and I was thinking that the G6s wide angle was the best second camera option until this happened. I am going to let the sample images speak for itself.
In short:
Very pleasing subtle bokeh
Color rendition on macros is "phenomenal"
Sharp... sharp as a needle.
No glaring smudgy artifacts on portrait mode when lighting is good.
very close focusing distance
did I say sharp.. its freaking sharp - just look at the chipmunk picture below, those hairs can give you a paper-cut by just looking.

Nice shots! Can't wait to get my 5T next week. Had the 5 before but sold it and now I'm borrowing a friend's 3T. So technically I've upgraded, then downgraded, and now will be upgrading again:laugh:

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OnePlus 5T User Opinions and Reviews

Anecdotally: Nexus 5x taking better night sight photos than pixel 2 xl

I had opportunity to test out my phone with a friend's pixel 2 xl (stock).
In the park in the middle of the night, almost no light source except for some far away street lights and a flash light.
Took a few photos in the exact same spot (distance and angle too) and I was getting noticeably better photos. (took a few in shots in the same spot to make sure it wasnt some fluke).
Of course, his photos were near instant and 5x took like, 30 secs to process the photo.
Anyways, thought it was interesting and wanted to share.