Anyone here a former iPhone user? I upgraded to FP2 from the iPhone5S and have always been bitterly disappointed with the FP2 camera.
My 5S camera took consistently better images in all light conditions, focused quicker and was consistently sharper. iPhone6 images are in a different league…
Has anyone been in the same situation and upgraded to the new camera module? If so how does it compare to iPhone cameras? Ie is the new camera module a worthy upgrade or will it still be sub par compared to iPhone5S
Finally, has anyone had better experience with third party camera apps? I’ve used the native app and tried “Open Camera” but neither seems significantly better than the other. Are there any other camera apps that deliver better results for the FP2?
I don’t have the new camera because I don’t make many pictures with my phone and therefore don’t need it, but many people here on the forum say that the new module makes significantly better pictures that the old one. Have a look at New Fairphone 2 camera and maybe New Fairphone 2 camera too
Edit: Whoops apparently I put two times the same link here. Of course I meant FP2 - Pictures Gallery
i have to disagree with @Gerry if we are talking about the new camera module. I came from another smartphone myself and I was really disappointed by the first gen camera too.
But the camera upgrade, even if not spectacular in pure specs, is a huge improvement. It might not be a match to the latest iPhones and Samsung’s, but it is a fine point and shoot now which in general takes good pictures, especially in natural light. Not only are the pictures sharper and have a higher resolution, they also have much better colors.
Have a look at the Fairphone Pictures Gallery for some example with the new camera: FP2 - Pictures Gallery
For me, I found using “Bacon Camera” from Google Play Store results in much better quality pictures in ambient light situations with the new camera module compared to my usually preferred OpenCamera from F-Droid store.
Ehm… @ben, saying that comparing the FP2 camera to Samsung/iPhone is like comparing a house to a palace is not the same as saying the camera is bad.
Yes, the new camera module is a vast improvement in image quality and I’m very happy with it, but there is more than just image quality.
lag between tapping and actually taking a picture is still between half a second to two seconds, depending on your settings (this is actually the worst thing IMO, since it ruins candid shots)
burst mode on the 5s is just really useful. Take 20 shots, select the one where nobody blinks.
5s had 120FPS video if you wanted it
These things are all related and boil down to one thing: operational speed. I honestly don’t know how much of this is software or hardware related, but it does reduce the power of the camera a bit.
But the FP2 is still a fine camera.
@Amber: ooh, interesting. It also seems to have less lag. I wonder how much of that is because it doesn’t use the Camera2 api - does that mean it’s all low-level hacks? Now if only I could figure out how to get it to use burst mode…
@Amber: Very interesting, your remarks to the bacon camera! Could you also say something about the focus- and camera speed together with the new FP2-camera? Until now I hesitated to buy it - and don’t use my FP2 for photos. And there is still my two years old Samsung S5 phone with the same processor, but a proper 16 MP camera. Got it for less than 100 € at eBay! But of course, I don’t carry two phones around with me!
Focus speed in Bacon Camera is same as for Open Camera, I would say. In both apps you can choose the autofocus mode with presumably same results.
For camera speed, it probably depends on the picture format. I save in bmp lossless format, where processing is done in foreground thread and takes some time. But bmp lossless format is the main advantage and reason to use for me.
There are also some features for jpeg compressed pictures, too. Additionally some sort of manual exposure settings, and GIF and Multi Exposures too, while don’t know results for them, yet.
You can try Bacon Camera for free. The purchase is mainly for being ad-free, which, in return, didn’t pop up for me in the free version.
Somewhat strange that Bacon Camera doesn’t use PNG - if you use a low enough compression setting that should be faster than BMP in most situations, because it’s so much less data to write to disk.
It’s fundamentally different though: JPG refers to how lossy it is (so image quality), whereas PNG refers to how strong the GZIP compression is (lossless).
