I purchased a Fairphone 3 just 1 month ago. I installed various apps that lets you regulate manual camera settings but I noticed that the maximum shutter speed possible with the camera is 1/2 seconds.
I would like to ask you if someone of you has any way to increase this shutter speed.
For example I noticed that for pixel 3a phones has a way to increase their shutter speed installing the “Long exposure magisk module”, i’m guessing if it will work on Fairphones 3.
Moreover I would like to ask you if someone of you has tried if the camera+ module of fairphone 3’s has a longer shutter speed than the 1/2 seconds of the regular modules.
Hi, shutter speed depens on CPU, that has the task to execute the whole process. FP3’s CPU (S635) is not a monster, but a quite mid range. Anyway, I bought the 3+ module some months ago and the results are awesome: better quality, better zooming and shutter is a bit faster. Many would shut me up but I can tell you … give a look at ISOCELLGM1 48MP spec on official site (link below), on Wiki you can find all the phones with SAMSUNG’s sensor (link below) and at last I paste a review from devicerank.
This is the sensor of FP3+: Improvements are higher that expected.
Yes, I’m sorry it wasn’t clear my explanation, I wasn’t talking about camera overall reactiveness and velocity.
My aim was to find a way to lenghten the exposure time for the Fairphone3 from 1/2 seconds to ex. 30 seconds.
I came from LG G4 that has got this capability (exposure range from 30 seconds to 1/8000 seconds) and it runs a Snapdragon 808. I don’t think is a question of CPU but instead just a minimal programming modification.
I also tried to contact the fairphone’s support 1 month ago but unfortunately none reply.
So my thinking was if was possible to increase the exposure time from 1/2 seconds just purchasing a camera+ module or in another software modification way, but as the fairphone 3 team don’t reply to that request I would like to ask you if some of you could try to see if this exposure time on a camera+ module increase from the 1/2 seconds of the standard module one.
Or if someone of you have tried the “exposure magisk module” to increase that exposure time.
From experience and other posts Fairphone support is very laggy and your request is probably way down their list of priorities.
By the way way would you want 30 secs, and if you have used such long exposures do they really work. I don’t know enough about the sensors so I wonder if they can collect an increasing amount of photons over 30 seconds and store it as voltage effect ??
I’m not an expert here, but I imagine that with long exposures, it’s possible to just do the sums in software - provided that there is still some access to the raw data, I presume. Super long exposures are crucial in night photography (e.g. of the sky) since stars don’t emit much light themselves. A drawback is that the camera must be extremely still during this timeframe. This is why, in part, it’s usually not worth the hassle to do it on your phone, at least not without careful preparation. I’m somewhat curious to know about how good of an image you could get out of a Fairphone 3+ for night photography, even if it doesn’t seem to be the right tool for the job to me
Yes unless the subject is very still, unless of course the objective is to show the change in star position relative to the observer location.
On the idea of summing data. The software will have to store the 48Mpx clear the sensor every so often, maybe once every second, for 30 seconds ~ some storage and summing ~ 1.5G data to CPU through.
Yes I used to do night shots with my old LG G4 and it was a nice feature to have.
Smartphones cameras has got wide angle lens ( from 28 mm to 24 mm full frame equivalent) that in dslr are very expensive but suitable for night photography.
For example I attach you in the first photo an example of a night shot made with my old LG G4 with a 30 seconds exposure time with 400 iso, i used to place him in a stable position for the entire time of the shot.
I tried also the GCam port on Fairphone 3 and using the astrophotograpy mode. I noticed that the exposure time increases to 1 seconds ( better from the 1/2 seconds from other manual camera apps) but unfortunately the sofware decides itself autonomusly the ISO sensibility that is frustrating and furthermore 1 second is still not enough for astrophotography. I attach you a second example shot made up with a Fairphone 3 camera with Gcam port and astrophotograpy mode, as you can see the results are disappointing (it was an hand held test, but I did also still tests pointing the camera to stars but the results are not good: stars were invisible).
From that I would like to ask you if someone have experience with the camera+ module (or with a Fairphone 3 +) with night shots and if some of you has tried the exposure magisk module as it is specified into the gcam ported app.
Hm, I’d recommend trying out a different port, possibly the 8.1 Nikita port… I recall the advanced settings having longer exposure times. (could it have been 16 seconds?) Turns out that the version of the port really makes a big impact on the extra features that it has. I can’t recommend this entirely, as my experience with GCam has been mixed, and after awhile the images did not save to my camera.
To answer your other question I have a FP3 with added camera + module and the longest exposure time (in OpenCamera) seems to be 0.3s. However, this may be a limitation of the Camera 2 API, at least according to this thread I found. https://sourceforge.net/p/opencamera/discussion/general/thread/c8fc482e/
Just installed the app again…
In the settings, Advanced, there should be an option to increase maximum exposure time. It’s called ISO/Exposure Time HDR. There you should see an option for 32 seconds.
Edit: I tried this feature out by just putting my phone face down on the table (complete darkness) and it didn’t seem to actually impact the time it took the image… So I’m not sure what this does
I just tried the 8.1 Nikita too but modificating all kind of settings the maximum exposure time is still 1/2 seconds. I think there is no way to increase the exposure time if not by modificating the Camera 2 API or by try a way to install the magisk module.
I hope that the Fairphone support will reply in future about this topic it seems to not be any way to resolve this issue.
This one did seem to give a longer exposure time, when I tried it out. Make sure that astrophotography is on, and that the phone is still enough at the start, so that “stars” appear, and the phone notifies you that Astrophotography is enabled.
I don’t give this solution the highest confidence, just given my experience with GCam in the past (stability issues mainly), but it seems to be the only solution I know of.
