In which Gingerbread broke my camera app. And there’s a question for you to answer!
[dropcap]I[/dropcap] take the majority of my photographs with my cell phone. They’re spontaneous pictures and don’t have to be high quality, but on the other hand, they do need to not actively suck.
My phone is an LG Optimus S. In the beginning, it took acceptable pictures even though it has always sucked in low-light conditions. It worked for my needs. It’s a fucking phone, after all.
But since the update to Gingerbread, it takes pictures like this:
That picture was taken in broad daylight, in bright sunlight. It was not taken at dusk. It was taken at ten o’clock in the morning on a sunny day. But see how dark it is? And how blue everything is?
I contacted Sprint to see if it was a known issue. They said it wasn’t. I reset my phone to factory default. It didn’t solve the problem. They asked me if I felt my issue had been addressed. I said, Have a nice shift.
I waited a couple months and asked again. Nope, apparently I’m the ONLY PERSON who uses the default camera app on this phone ANYWHERE, EVER and the issue has not been reported. They had me tap the ‘Restore defaults’ item in the camera’s settings menu.
When I use a third-party app to take pictures (in this case, RetroCamera), the lighting is fine:
The problem is the camera software, and not a hardware issue. It annoys me that I have to use a third-party app to take pictures, but I guess I should be happy they even pushed Gingerbread to my phone in the first place since clearly I’m the ONLY PERSON who uses that model.
Anyway. Sound off!
Question: What Droid camera app do you like?
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Dear the electronics industry: There are people out here who use your products who want to give you useful feedback. You should make it easy for us to do so. Put a form on your site or something. In particular, I mean you Verizon, Sprint, LG, and Encore. Love, Me.
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I’ve been using Little Photo with the paid plugin for a while and have been happy with it. I got the plugin because it would let me pull in higher res images through the built-in camera app, which may not be worth doing in your situation. As a standalone, it does a decent job, though, and produces an image size that’s easier to upload than the larger files the built-in app generally produces.
Thanks for the tip. It takes nice pictures! -m
I can see why you wouldn’t want to use another app if the non-default app doesn’t have useful functions like the ability to share to Facebook, Twitter, SMS or email. My girlfriend has the Samsung Galaxy S II and she takes great pictures. It could be that your phone is a dud and should just be replaced. Since they’ve had you restore defaults and you’ve wiped and reinstalled the OS and the issue still happens you’d have a pretty good leg to stand on to get it either repaired, or more likely just flat out replaced. I have an iPhone 4, a whole ‘nother conversation entirely, and I like the default camera app.
Since the hardware is demonstrably fine, I doubt they’d replace it. I might try anyway, though. -m