I find the poor quality of the camera the biggest disadvantage of my Fairphone3+. Is there any possibility to replace the camera with a better one?
I don’t think this is going to happen one day soon. The camera of the FP3+ was already supposed to be a superior version of the original FP3 camera.
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Hi it’s a 48 Mpx camera that has an output of 12Mpx. It uses a 4 pixels block to calculate the best out from the matrix of 4, how it really makes much of a difference I have no satisfactory idea.
I have 5Mpx cameras that do a better job, however the best are proper cameras that let in more light. With the small aperture size it’s more design in the software to process the low grade info, hence the 48Mpx idea.
There are posts that say a better image can be produced form alternative apps, one being Open Camera, which I have installed but do not find it significantly better.
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There will be no hardware upgrade, I think not.
You can hope for a software upgrade though, Fairphone said they were working on one (but no idea when it will come out).
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In my experience Open Camera is even worse than the stock app. If you want better quality you need a Google camera port, but these are of questionable legality and come from unknown sources, so they pose a considerable security risk. I installed one anyway because I couldn’t stand the photos the stock app takes (if it saves the photo at all, at least in earlier versions it often didn’t). I posted a small comparison using the FP3+ camera and a Google Camera port vs. the stock app a while ago. Just three shots, each time first with Google Camera, then with the stock app.
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I notice that all the Google ones are brighter, but that’s about it.
For example: looking at the first pair I notice the Google has, as a consequence of it’s brightness, less definition ~ on the stock app you can see clouds above the chimney which the Google doesn’t render.
My assessment is quite different: the gCam photos are not just brighter, they’re passable HDR photos, while the stock app, which was set to “auto HDR”, failed rather miserably.
For me the first and last shots are far too dark with the stock app. These two were taken in difficult lighting conditions as this is where the stock app has the biggest problems. In the first picture this leads to the clouds being visible, true, but this seems to me to be a small and unimportant detail compared to the rest of the image. Far too much is essentially just black. The same is true for the last shot. In general, in these two cases the gCam photo much better reflects what I saw when I was there.
In the second shot the difference is less big, but in the gCam version the colours are closer to my real-life impression, there are no dark areas where the details vanish, and there is less noise overall.
Finally, the stock app tends to produce HDR artifacts. You can see them very clearly in the last image around the overhead lines (maybe zoom in a bit).
Yes I see the distortion around the overhead lines.
Google Cam works fantastic with low light, in darkness, in night. Apart from that, its nothing fancy.
Open Camera requires some configuration in general.
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