Hi there,
I’m a new user of Fair phones and I have just bought the FP3. I wonder if it wouldn’t be better to buy the 3+ instead.
I’m using an iPhone 4s for years now.
I have doubts about the quality of the pictures compared to iPhone, and about the bugs of the FP. I haven’t tested this yet though. My boyfriend actually advised me to buy the 3+ because of the pics, but I thought “I have such an old iPhone, would the quality matter that much”?
He insisted on it ánd I realised that with the 3+ bugs of the 3 might have been solved.
So I would like to check if my thoughts are correct or false.
Good to know that I don’t edit my pictures, the only thing special I do with the camera is zooming in on things in nature.
Admittedly, to me, smartphone pictures are totally irrelevant. Therefore I am not the one to advise on the qualitiy of the camera.
But there is a thread about comparing the pictures of the camera, you could be interested in reading:
Still, in general I would side with your boyfriend in this regard.
If pictures are important to you, opting for the new camera seems sensible. While both cameras are shooting 12 MP pictures, the ones with the new module are using quad-pixel technology, thus enhancing low light quality. (At least, that’s the advertising of Fairphone and the camera-chip manufacturer. I can’t judge by own experience.)
In addition the FP3+ has an updated audio chip and speaker module.
Therefore it lacks a translucent back-cover (due to a higher percentage of recycled materials) and a bumper.
Regarding bugs, you will find, when browsing the forum, that there are quite a few parallel bug reports regarding the FP3 as well as the FP3+. The reason is, that the most important bugs seem to be related to the update to Android 10.
As it seems, it depends in part on the country and networkd provider if you are affected by some bugs. But Fairphone is busy working on solving those issues.
Still, the majority of phones seems to work flawlessly. This forum is no exact mirror of reality, as it is usually visited when problems or questions occur and not just to tell, that everything is fine.
Maybe there will be some users here, that can give you more or bettetr advice on the camera.
In any case I still consider my FP3 (running on /e/) to be a great phone. But I have bought into this idea with the FP1 in the preorder phase already (my wife is using hers still as one and only phone). So I might be a bit prejudiced.
Hi Astrid,
software role regarding photo quality is often underestimated. And the stock photo app is terrible. At Commown we spent some time comparing photos with FP3/FP3+ with the stock app and others (namely OpenCamera with good settings and GCAM), and our conclusions are that software influence on quality is even greater than hardware’s, so we recommend sticking with your FP3 cam but use the right app with the right settings: this is much better from an ecological point of view. See our complete wiki article (in French) here.
If you have an iphone wouldn’t it make sense to stay in the ecosystem? Iphone SE is a great choice, unless you really care about the impact. Android is a different beast entirely. I had fairphone 3 for a year now without any problems but I’m not a heavy user. The weakness of the camera is not the hardware but software. FP3+ has better hardware so the photo quality will be somewhat better but not by much.
no worries, the FP3+ is hardly better than the FP3. Neither in general nor when it comes to image quality.
For taking photos, I would recommend the Pro mode of the stock camera app or trying out alternative camera apps, e.g. Open Camera.
“Zooming in on things in nature” will probably not deliver any spectacular results, neither for tele nor for macro. But this should not differ much from your 4s.
