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Comment by jonjohn84 | Hacker News Reader

Seems there's some confusion about whether the nexus 5 ended up with a mems camera. I thought that it did not...

"With a little help from our MEMS, you can still take photos in quick succession with the speedy new autofocus."

I just tried taking some shots at my desk and while it focused fast, I wouldn't say it's living up to the hype of 6 multi focal shots per second.

EDIT: It appears that they are using the MEMS acronym, not the branded product. The component itself does not look like the MEMS|Cam branded components either.

Edit 2: Just read more on MEMS and if this phone has MEMS, then the camera software is NOT supporting it. It can take up to a solid second for the camera to make even minute adjustments.

It would surprise me if it had it, or if it supported it, because from what I noticed, the photos tend to have some focus issues.

I also think Google needs a whole rewrite for the Android camera app, by camera experts, because the camera is becoming a great competitive advantage, and I think the Android camera app/driver framework is keeping a lot of OEM's back. If they do rewrite it and make it very good for Android 5.0, they will hopefully allow it to be installed to other devices, too, like they already did for the keyboard and launcher.

I don't care if they rewrite the camera app, so much as standardize a sufficient set of fine grained APIs so that other people can write great camera apps. I know there's a lot of low level, custom interaction with the DSP that is hard to capture in an API, but the current level of granularity is just woefully inadequate. If they just focused on getting a really detailed standard API as part of Android I'm sure a thousand beautiful camera apps would bloom and we might even see a whole new mini-industry come from specialist camera apps for specific situations.

I thought they re-wrote it when Photosphere came out and I seem to remember there being some sort of animated-gif/parallax gif feature being added that I can't seem to find.

I totally agree...time to get a decently functioning camera in there.

It's likely referring to a MEMS gyroscope used for optical image stabilisation. A MEMS camera doesn't exist, it was rumoured to be a MEMS motor was used as part of the focusing system.

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