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Personally I don't care for phone photos, they always suck for me. I use my phone camera to do stuff like send photo of a document when needed, or take a photo

Personally I don't care for phone photos, they always suck for me. I use my phone camera to do stuff like send photo of a document when needed, or take a photo of a package as proof it arrived intact or something like that. The reason is that phones for years been screwing the photos no matter what you do, at one point both me and my dad bought a Motorola phone where they promised it would have an "eco-system" of accessories, with existing ones including more advanced cameras, game controllers and so on. We went to a place full of beautiful animals, took a ton of photos, but when we checked his photos, all of them were horribly screwed, like everything was pink, or even literally sheared, I found out the reason is that when you use the viewfinder, the phone skips some processing, as soon you take the photo, it mandatorily does some processing, in Motorola's case with a very buggy chip that would inevitably ruin your photos. Poking in the photo files it looked like the algorithm was managing to misalign the file in memory before doing the calculations. Something similar to mixing endianess.

grishka 4y ago
This feels like it should be fixable with a firmware update, except this probably was at the time when firmware updates on phones required proprietary equipment and software more often than not.
Tanoc 4y ago
I learned a long time ago that software cannot overcome the faults of hardware when it comes to image capture. Only try to obscure those faults. Many phones have apertures that are too wide, sensors that are too small, and barrels that are far too shallow. The result is that without extremely long exposures, the image is too dark due to the aperture. Or that without a denoising algorithm like OptiX the image has so much noise that it's like looking at something made in Deluxe Paint on an Apple II. Or that due to the small sensor size a "4K" image is actually eight separate 2K images stitched together and downscaled to obscure artifacting and blurry edges. The truth is that you cannot put the necessary hardware into a smartphone to take DSLR quality pictures. Not with the current form factor, and especially not if you're trying to be cost effective. They've tried getting around this by selling add-ons that socket into the body, or using three, four, even five cameras, more than one light sensor, and all of this damaging software. But manufacturers are trying to polish a dirt floor. There will always be imperfections simply because the materials weren't made for that level of quality.

grishka 4y ago

This feels like it should be fixable with a firmware update, except this probably was at the time when firmware updates on phones required proprietary equipment and software more often than not.

Tanoc 4y ago

I learned a long time ago that software cannot overcome the faults of hardware when it comes to image capture. Only try to obscure those faults. Many phones have apertures that are too wide, sensors that are too small, and barrels that are far too shallow. The result is that without extremely long exposures, the image is too dark due to the aperture. Or that without a denoising algorithm like OptiX the image has so much noise that it's like looking at something made in Deluxe Paint on an Apple II. Or that due to the small sensor size a "4K" image is actually eight separate 2K images stitched together and downscaled to obscure artifacting and blurry edges. The truth is that you cannot put the necessary hardware into a smartphone to take DSLR quality pictures. Not with the current form factor, and especially not if you're trying to be cost effective. They've tried getting around this by selling add-ons that socket into the body, or using three, four, even five cameras, more than one light sensor, and all of this damaging software. But manufacturers are trying to polish a dirt floor. There will always be imperfections simply because the materials weren't made for that level of quality.