Hacker News Reader

Comment by hffftz | Hacker News Reader

Is there anyway to get the camera's best possible image quality without using/installing the Google Camera app?

I don't think so, because a lot of the magic is in the software itself, not the camera. There's an excellent article about what these software do to the image to make it look better, or make it seem like having properties it doesn't have, with post-processing.

https://vas3k.com/blog/computational_photography/

GrapheneOS is working on a new camera application. While it is still under heavy development and based on alpha Android APIs, it's already very usable with much better image quality than any other camera.

As I understand it, Pixel phones do image processing in hardware instead of in software so CameraX can provide the same level of image quality as Google Camera.

https://github.com/GrapheneOS/Camera

I have not run CalyxOS, but on my pixel (in my opinion), Open Camera using DRO already provides much better quality images than the stock camera app for most conditions.

Can OpenCamera take a photo of a flickering sign? it seemed to me that it would wait forever for an image to stabilize before taking a picture. It's a great app for a classic way of taking a photo, but all modern smartphone camera applications capture everything 100% of the time and only apply some ML and pick the best shit out of a samples collected aroumd the time shoot button was pressed. I tried to live with OpenCamera for ages, but it's very slow to operate and doesn't support my wide angle camera at all. It's low light performance is poor and it is very slow even in the best of conditions. And it was buggy very often. 3/10, sometimes pictures were made, most often in a frustrating manner.

It is definitely slow in DRO mode. I have not had it act buggy on me. When I could use it from intent on android 10, it was far less buggy than the google camera app, which does not work well with intents - reopening without sending picture back on confirmation often, etc (although there have been some improvements on that end in recent updates).

I highly doubt that, does Open Camera does ML?

Maybe by "stock camera" he's talking about AOSP camera, not google camera (the proprietary camera that's the default camera on pixels)

I am talking about google camera app that came out of the box on my pixel. I take a few hundred pictures a day for work, I am forced to use it due to their stupid intent policy on Android 12, and I frankly hate it.

Why not install it without internet permission?

That's what I did... I was hoping for a way around that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com