I’m having issues with the camera on my Fairphone 4. I find it really struggles with focus, adjusting to light and representing colours accurately on auto mode, with little improvement achievable through manual settings. While the pictures taken are large files the quality of the images is poor. I was hoping for a camera that would take good enough pictures for social media and blogging but despite much higher specs I’m increasingly using my old 6 + year old Samsung for the camera which pretty much defeats the object of a costly upgrade.
I’ve read through threads here on camera related issues and they very quickly get very technical and appear to involve downloading various apps to compensate for lack of built in functionality and performance. Am I missing something here?
thanks for any input.
Under which lighting conditions are you taking pictures?
I don’t know much about what is needed for social media or blogging, I use it mainly outdoors and coming from a FP2 I’m really happy with the camera overall.
Depending on your use case (indoor, low light etc.) another App might help, without the need to get technical.
Have you seen this
And make sure you’re using the latest OS version as there were voices saying the quality has improved with the OS updates.
Thanks for your response.
Certainly indoor is a problem in terms of colour. The 2 pictures below show the difference in a picture taken in poor indoor light. You can see the higher spec in the clarity of Fairphone picture (bottom) but the colours are totally wrong, whereas the Samsung A3 2016 (top) doesn’t have the clarity but the colours are pretty much spot on.
I need to be able to take reasonable pictures indoors to demonstrate for example as with this piece of knitwear a seaming technique I was using. Colours are also important because I naturally dye yarn and need to be able to show the colour - So far I have one place outside where I have enough light, but not to too much, to be able to do so effectively.
But the issue isn’t only about staging particular shots where I can more easily control the situation as a workaround, although sitting outside in the rain to seam a piece of knitwear so I can take adequate pictures is a bit of a stretch…
The pictures below are a random selection of pictures taken outdoors between July and November this year which also show issues with natural light. The final picture was also taken using the zoom, but the rest weren’t. All were on auto settings or landscape.
OyiqfwvI5Jn8c1tGElWVZNv2.jpeg)
Any thoughts most welcome. Yes, I had seen the thread you linked to, I’ll look again but that was a thread that seemed quite technical to me … 
thanks, Tess
Thank you, I’ve checked and I have android 11 which updated in September and there don’t appear to be any further updates.
I’ve had weird colors with the FP4 camera in an earlier version. If I remember right clearing the cache and/or clearing the memory of the camera app solved the problem.
HTH, Harald
Thanks for this suggestion. I’ve cleared the cache and storage via apps, and restarted the phone but it doesn’t seem to have helped. Having cleared storage did not clear all my previous pictures. Do I need to delete them all manually to clear the memory? I’ve downloaded everything to my laptop so could do so.
thanks again, Tx
Clearing storage does not delete pictures and I dont see how deleting pictures would help with the issues, so I would not worry about this.
So just to see what happens, could you try another cam app on the FP4 if not done yet? In the past OpenCamera was often recommended and has many manual settings.
Else a Gcam Port could by useful many use the Nikita Version. Just download and allow installation and install.
Did you take the pictures with HDR enabled?
For me, picture quality (and colour accuracy) drastically improved after I disabled HDR.
FP4 has a potato camera despite the hilarious marketing claims, that’s nowhere near even cheap phones from years back, let alone any flagships. There are no two ways about it. You can slightly mitigate it by installing the GCam as others have suggested. But that tends to cause the camera to become unavailable from time to time and you lose wide-angle and full resolution.
Can you share these pictures with FP support? They may really use your comparisons to improve the color accuracy, but also the auto focus. For a camera setup that has a dedicated TOF sensor it’s really poor at auto focus. It has improved with updates from about 6 months ago. But after that the improvements stopped. But please #contactsupport and share this with them. They don’t actively monitor the forum.
It could be that you have set the scene categories to auto. Some filters are really screwing up the color accuracy. Things may become purple (or anything else) because of that. It doesn’t happen often, but it can. The candlelight scene is one that may do that.
Have to agree, the camera or rather the software is really poor quality, colours are all wrong and the shutter response time is awful. It’s the worst feature of this phone. Really disappointed with it.
Same here. The old Samsung takes much better pics than FP4. An what is also annoying is the time it takes to focus. The real pictures is taken a second after
I have an alternative operating system installed called iodéOS. It comes with a modded version of Open camera where the wide angle lens works and it correctly displays the colors.
If you want to give it a try, you don’t need to install the whole operating system, you can just install open camera port for FP4 in the link below, just scroll down until you see “opencamera-8.apk”, download and install that one.
Works fine in my fp4
OpenCamera 8 works under stock OS, but not wide angle lens. Even though using camera2 api.
Oh I didn’t know that, since it works in iodé I thought it should also work in stock. My bad
iodé installed Open Camera as a system app and with SYSTEM_CAMERA permissions. You can’t do that yourself as a normal user.
I find all my photos are terrible. I just want a click and go type app taking photos of my kids (who are always on the move), I don’t think i’ve actually got any decent ones of them 
I’m not particularly techy so “simply” downloading an app not from an app store is a bit beyond me, but i’ll give it a go. Just would like some decent photos especially as my Wife keeps rincing me about the shocking quality of the camera (and my ability . . . ) haha
You may like to try the F-Droid app store > Open Camera
It’s also on Google Play