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Comment by chdir | Hacker News Reader

My biggest gripe with Nexus series has been the camera. None of the releases has made a quantum leap in terms of picture quality. I don't care about gimmickries like HDR, live photos, sphere etc., all I want is a $300 Point & Shoot quality. Something that won't make me feel guilty for using a camera phone for preserving spontaneous memories. Please Google :)

Samsung has done a great job with the S6, the others like G4 & Moto aren't far behind.

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DXOMark is the gold standard of photo-quality evaluations. Their evaluations for mobile phones show the Nexus 6 to have been very good for when it was released (it's #12 now, but most of the phones above it are newer); the Nexus 6P is ranked #2 right now: http://www.dxomark.com/Mobiles

I can't believe they don't show you any picture results at least.

DXOMark is all about shooting specific test targets under controlled lighting conditions and automated algorithmic analysis of the results. Basically they're trying to scientifically measuring the maximum potential of a given sensor under ideal conditions. They don't produce any interesting images to look at.

Sites like connect.dpreview.com on the other hand are all about the actual photography and cover things like handling, UI and real life performance and results

Nice! Didn't think they would be able to get a hold of one so fast.

Can someone confirm the rear shooters on the 5X and 6P are the same hardware? The specs are identical.

Hm, I'm surprised they don't have the iPhone 6S on there. Maybe it's coming.

HDR isn't a gimmick, it dramatically improves the picture quality. You get the effect of a super-long exposure on noise level and dynamic range, but with image stabilization, and a compromise on the moving objects in the scene.

HDR is a gimmick in the sense that it just takes information from the sensor to bring out highlights. This is the sort of thing that can be done in post-processing on any RAW image. Its not a feature of the camera itself.

Android and iOS HDR systems take multiple pictures very rapidly at different exposures and knit them together. You can't manually take the same “input” pictures as rapidly as an HDR system.

Do you have a source for that? I've also been under the impression that HDR in most phones is just a gimmick that operates on a single exposure.

Here's the google research blog post about it. http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2014/10/hdr-low-light-and...

Thanks!

I can tell from experience because some HDR photos taken on my Nexus 4 without being steady for long enough show artifacts of multiple exposures.

That's not how it works. Here's the google research blog post about it. http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2014/10/hdr-low-light-and...

I know there's 2 ways to do HDR. Either way, there's been apps available for that for awhile.

Taking multiple exposures with a camera with an electronic shutter (pretty much all smartphones) is still just a 'trick'.

BTW, the Galaxy Note 3's stock camera app does HDR, I'm sure most phones already did a year ago...

I'm not sure what your definition of a "trick" is. The quality of the results varies greatly depending on the algorithm used, which is maybe why you don't have a good impression of it. This one aligns the exposures and detects motion which is not something you can easily do by hand. In practice, I find my nexus 5 with HDR+ often takes superior pictures to my consumer grade DLSR, so much so that it's hard to justify taking the DSLR on trips anymore.

For instance, compare these two pictures taken at the same spot with a nexus 5 and Canon EOS Rebel T2i. https://goo.gl/photos/8ZrXoEC283oJ3NmC9 The nexus 5 one is just way better. The conventional camera struggles to keep even the foreground and midground properly exposed. The nexus 5 gets everything from the foreground to the sky, exactly as I saw it.

Fitting a $300 point and shoot (canon s130?) into a tiny space for $20 BOM would be amazing engineering. Bigger sensor, bigger, less rugged lens, ability to move elements. It is a testament to amazing software that camera phones are as good as they are.

I've heard nothing but compliments about the photos from my Nexus 5 camera. They're very high resolution and look great. I'll post some from Imgur if you want. What problems are you having with yours?

You kidding right? Maybe your have the art of taking photos with that phone down or something but pictures I take with it always seems to washed out compared to my Moto X(another bad one)

This one looks alright to me, and didn't get any comments that it was taken with a "potato":

https://m.imgur.com/wzMqO8p

To be honest, to me it looks a bit noisy, washed out colors, and it must not have been taken in bright lighting because you can see some camera shake. There's also a lot of smudging in the carpet and wall textures, which makes me think that either there originally was a lot of noise before post-processing, or the noise removal software on the phone isn't very good.

I'll take that as a compliment. The photo was taken one-handed while standing in the "elevator lobby" of the floor, so it was facing the bright light instead of having the lighting behind the target. The image might be inferior to a DSLR on a tripod, but for simple functionality I think this device is highly suitable. And it fits in most pockets.

Make sure you have HDR mode turned on and your hands are steady. I have taken some great pictures with this phone.

Same here. Can we/anyone tell from the specs how good (say, relative to S6/iPhone6) the new camera will be?

DxO seems to think that it is very good : http://www.dxomark.com/Mobiles/Google-Nexus-6P-review-Seriou... It seems that Google has really worked on the camera module this time around.

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