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Camera 360 - Better Picture Quality?

kevhow said:
The update this morning moved the ad. It no longer appears when you are taking a picture. Instead it pops up when you exit the program. Much better placement.
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The new stabilization mode also automatically takes the picture once your camera is steady. No more having to press twice. Cool...
 
I did finally notice that ad last night. I'm glad the new update moves it until after you take a picture. I'm more glad though that they fixed it to where it automatically takes after focus on stabilazation mode. It was annoying to me to have to hit the button more than once so I turned that feature off.
 
Has anyone been able to set this as the default camera? I have the option ticked, but when I long press the camera button I get the stock camera app. I went into the application settings to clear the camera default, but it doesn't give me that option. Any suggestions?

Moto Droid / 2.1
 
only thing i changed on camera 360 was the resolution to match the one of the stock camera, 1280x840.
 

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Everytime I use 360, it seems that the sharpness is over-exaggerated. Everything about the app is much better than the stock one though.
 
The stabilizing feature alone is worth it. I do not have a steady hand and the "shutter" on the stock camera is too oversensitive leaving me with oodles of blurry shots.
I wish this thread had come along before I took my daughter to her first concert. Fortunately some of the pictures did come out, but if we'd have had this, it would have been more.
 
ttran97 said:
This is nice and I like the anti-shake and the ability to take a picture by touching the software button instead of the trackball.

Only one thing lacking, though...DATE STAMP! :(
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Quickest way to ruin a picture is with that big ol' ugly date/time stamped on it! The date, time, and all info is in the exif data (properties). Don't ruin the photos!! :p
 
Does everyone get a kind of "haze" around their pics? Like this:
IMAG0011.jpg

I'd swear the pics were a bit better under 1.5
 
kevhow said:
... I downloaded an app called Camera 360 from the market. I've been taking several pictures and comparing them side by side. To me, Camera 360 looks like it takes much better pictures....what did you think?
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I think that Camera 360 is one of the best finds I've yet seen for the Eris. The stock picture quality is notorious for being low quality. This app is a quantum leap in sharpness and clarity, not to mention configurability.
 
I can' believe I hadn't found this app. I hated the stock camera and was going through camera apps faster than Frisco goes through avatars :p

I even paid for Pro Zoom, which I like. But i agree with everyone here... This seems to be the best by far
 
Resized the picture, but you can still see how great this camera app is! Click to see it bigger (320x480).
 

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Weird.. as soon as I started the app, it showed the splash screen then went into "energy saver mode". I haven't been able to get it out of that mode since, even if I restart the app. The only way to leave it is to push the Home button.

Am I doing something wrong?
 
I haven't tested this, but my guess is that the stock app takes pics at maybe 72dpi (dots per inch) and maybe the Camera 360 takes pics at 300dpi? The higher the dpi, the larger the file size. I am guessing this because the stock app is probably created with the thought of having to email these pictures and send them in messages, so they have to save pictures as pretty small files.

Maybe I'll test the resolution of the photos in both apps via Photoshop
 
cableguynoe said:
Did you do the resize from within the camera app?
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I uploaded the picture up to Photo editor online - Pixlr.com edit image and resized it there. I set it at 100% quality...did the same for the stock cam picture that I'm posting here too.

hallstevenson said:
Take the same pic with the HTC camera for comparison.
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Ok. I resized the one from the stock cam too. Stock cam is on the left and has the date imprint on the pic (which i still think is useful...ahem). :)


Edit: I also want to add that I like the shooting mechanism much better than the stock camera. I just press the camera icon, it zooms, and automatically takes a picture when the picture is steady. I've been looking for a camera for a long time that had an on-screen button and also took pictures at high resolutions. Picture quality is important to me, but the differences are relative neglible to me. It's the UI and ease of operation that's got me hooked!
 

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katydid99 said:
Does it save pictures to your SD card? I am reading reviews of the app on the market and several of them say it doesn't.
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Yeah, it saves it to your SD card. The default location is \sd\DCIM\Camera. I think you can change it to some other choice that it gives you, but you can't specify your own location.
 
I decided to make some personal investigations into this. I wanted to know "how much better" is Camera 360 than the stock camera app. We all know it has plenty more features, hands down. But is it really that much better, as far as the picture quality goes?

I took all the pictures at 5 megapixel, but I had to resize them all down to 1600 x 1200 for Photobucket to fit the 1 MB file limit (and resized all of them to give them all a fair shot, in case it introduced artifacts and such). I also thumbnailed them in the post for sheer size reasons. But you can click on them for more detail if you want.


Control

First up, the control picture. Its the control picture, because its taken from a dedicated digital camera, so it should get the focus, lighting, and such correct. Its a 3 year old Olympus FE-340 point and shoot. So its not anything professional, but its better than a cell phone camera that's for sure. And the picture it shows here is pretty accurate to the real thing.


Medium Sharpness - Stock App

This picture is taken from the stock camera app, with medium sharpness.


High Sharpness - Stock App

Then this picture from the stock app, with high sharpness.


Camera 360 Test Picture

Then this one, from the Camera 360 app.



And here is a section compare in Photoshop.

My verdict: While the quality is good, it seems to me, that the results are almost no different than using the stock app and changing the the sharpness all the way up. I personally think that the stock app yields far more natural looking results at medium sharpness and is closer to a dedicated digital camera. It seems that is exaggerates lines and edges to make it look like its far sharper, but it really isn't. My opinion of course, and you can formulate your own from my sample pictures or your own.

However, 360 does have a far greater feature set, and has the stabilization feature so blurry pics are far less common. It also seems that it compresses the pictures more, as the stock camera takes nearly 2 MB pictures, and yet the same picture in 360 took only 900 KB. Maybe the stock camera is saving them at 100% quality JPEG's?
 
i think both the camera 360 app and the stock camera take about the same quality picture out doors but i think the camera 360 app takes a much better picture in low light than the stock camera. You should do a side by side in low light the camera 360 would be much better.
 
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