Please note: All photos downsized by the forum as well as on flickr (see further down)
14 Fairphone 5 shots
I spent two long, hot, mercilessly sunny late afternoons this week walking the nearby forest and taking around 250 photos with the Fairphone 5 – standard photos, a few “High Pixel” photos and wideangle photos. Here are 14 of these right away.
For a rough comparison, I took the shots both with Fairphone’s pre-installed Camera app as well as – suggested by another Fairphoner – GCam (the version mentioned here) on the same device. With some delay due to my thickness, I eventually figured out how to use the wideangle lens on GCam as well, but so far not if/how I can make 50 MP shots with GCam. Click to see the above 14 photos coupled with roughly the same shot through GCam:
For more than 100 (again Default vs. GCam) out of the 250 photos, see this gallery that comes with some EXIF details as well: https://flic.kr/s/aHBqjAU86g
The Fairphone 5 these photos were taken with was loaned to me by Fairphone for our upcoming 11 September Aachen meetup and will travel to Hamburg (19 September) and Munich (25 September) right after. Find these and potentially additional future meetups here:
I’ve seen some reviewers complaining about the quality of ultrawide camera, and from your photos I would say that they look mostly fine, but in some shots, some parts do look a bit noisy or lack details. On Fairphone’s website I found “Pixel Binning” being listed as a feature and I wondered whether this might help with it (I never owned a phone with more megapixels than 12, so I never had that feature available). Could you please compare Pixel Binning being on versus off? Maybe even compare if other cameras also improve with this feature enabled? (Even tho, in my opinion, the main camera looks pretty good already). I’d be really thankful
I think it’s mostly a problem in shadows, so I also wondered if you could possibly take a few night photos as well? That would be great
Ah, that’s a bit unfortunate. But I understand. I can wait, no pressure. Maybe even someone else from the community would also be able to share their results. Well, I guess I could do that, once I get my own Fairphone 5, but that might take quite a while as I’m still saving for it
So that means someone else will have to report how it will have performed during the German warning test day on Thursday
Thanks for sharing all the experiences that you could gather while you had it!
Got my new FP5 today and started trying out the new camera, comparing it to my “old” FP4.
Considering the quality of the Fairphone image software always was rather mediocre, I tried out the BSG Google Cam port for Android 11+, and yeah, it can access the FP5 wide camera lens too:
Here are some pictures of my kitchen in low natural lighting conditions for comparison (it’s rainy outside).
FP5 standard rear camera with Fairphone’s own camera app:
So far it seems like a huge improvement over the FP4 camera software. The ghosting of people making the slightest movement has been reduced to an acceptable level. Night mode seems reasonable, detail is missing, but low light doesn’t create these extreme fuzzy artifacts anymore. There is still room for some improvement. But this is a huge milestone into the right direction. Selfies are also much better now, especially with the new portrait mode.
Good you’re bringing up selfies. I also found this a significant improvement. The eternal visual “pressed-together” squeeze effect from the sides is visibly reduced now, and the FP5 was actually the first smartphone (or rather first Fairphone) front camera that produced selfies of myself I could live with – without having to take 20 at once each time to find an acceptable one among them.
Fun fact. I did a blind test with selfies from a FP5 and a Pixel 3 (so, no one who evaluated the selfies knew which phone was used for each selfie). It was a guessing game. The quality is nearly the same. More testing is needed, but it seems amazing
Coming from the FP2 I’m really impressed by the performance in general and by the low light performance in particular. Picture was taken quickly during the night ride demonstration of our local bicycle club.
Did the train stop there or did it just pass through?
And latest Nikita. Niktan wasnt updated quite some time and wide angle lense isnt working, just black screen and I noticed sometimes red artifacts at the edges like in this picture
