We are looking into the blue flash issue. Will update once there is something.
1 Like
I’ve had the same autofocus frustration that FalconFour complained about. I just installed the OpenCamera you suggested and at first glance the AF seems to function more predictably. Is Teracube going to update our code any time soon?
My other camera question is about camera resolution. My 2e compares very poorly to the iPhone 12, yet the 2e has 13MP and the iPhone12 has 12MP. Is this because of motion? AF? Sensor quality? I do know that when I took indoor, daytime pictures of my son raising our grandson up in the air the motion was terrible! Everyone in my family, 6 of us, plus friends and in-laws, all have iPhone 11s and 12s, except me. My camera is the brunt of jokes. And one son tells me to delete my low-quality pictures when I post something. And when I compare their pictures and mine, taken side-by-side, I can see poorer detail in the 2e pictures. I doubt OpenCamera will solve this problem. Is Teracube thinking about moving to a higher quality, more expensive sensor in the future?
1 Like
It’s about the quality of sensor, not number of pixels – this is why megapixels stopped mattering a long time ago. Having a ton of pixels means nothing if they’re garbage sensors serving each pixel. Hard to explain why, without showing tons of examples and getting into how light sensing works… but long story short: it’s a cheap sensor. The rear cameras on the 2e are the front cameras on other phones. But remember, it’s also a $200 phone.
I recognize that I bought a cheap phone, so that’s what I live with. I’m OK with the quality of this camera, 'til Teracube comes up with their higher-end version (not a “3e”, but dropping the “e” for economy). Remember: a single iPhone now costs 5x Teracube 2e’s. There’s a massive difference in price between the two. I imagine a bit of it has to do with gaining the experience to make a phone worthy of the higher price tag, and that’ll come soon.
2 Likes
Yes, I wish they’d chosen a sensor with fewer pixels, but larger for low-light, and higher quality.
Of course, Apple pays more for their sensor. But Apple also marks up their phone more. To me, one of the many advantages of Teracube is that their markup is lower.
I don’t know what the manufacturing costs of the sensors are, so I’m guessing. If I’d been given a choice of the cheap sensor or a higher-quality sensor for $40 more, I’d gladly spend the $40. Any idea what Sony gets for their 12MP sensor?
I’m getting so good god blessed tired of this phone’s awful camera and this autofocus problem…
I of course have only been using OpenCamera since it seemed to be better at its job than the stock camera. However, I consistently find, now, that it doesn’t perform autofocus at all when tapped - it only performs exposure adjustment on a blurry photo.
I spent about 30 seconds here struggling with the camera trying to take the following photo:
Behold: it is f*cking blurry. Despite how many times I tapped, tapped, tapped the screen (it did not perform a single focus sweep despite how many times I tried)… I point the camera away, point it back (it did not perform a focus sweep…), or when I closed and reopened the camera (it STILL did not perform a focus sweep).
This is not a failure of the autofocus algorithm to do its job - it’s a failure of the ability for software to trigger the autofocus to be performed in the first place. There seems to be no reliable way to TELL it to “focus on this, at this exact moment, now”. Tapping a spot only performs exposure adjustment on a spot, but it doesn’t focus.
This is so incredibly frustrating, it has basically trained me to stop even thinking of taking photos with my phone. To get that back, I have to buy a new phone. 
1 Like
I feel your pain. On my last phone I could tap on the screen and it would auto focus on that area. With this new phone, 2e, tapping changes the brightness/saturation levels instead which is really annoying. I have to wait until it decides to focus before I can take a picture, which takes a long time between shots.
1 Like
I also have stopped taking photos because of this reason.
I also have this issue. Recently, I bought a Teracube 2e
Somehow my Teracube 2e can autofocus after tapping, well it is not fast but at least usable. People here say that Open Camera is better, but I somehow cannot differentiate the result between Open Camera and Default Camera app.
@FalconFour @Trizzle (and others) - could you help us by providing a video (screen capture using AZScreenRecorder or a separate camera/phone… Few things to keep in mind:
-
Tapping the screen does force the camera to try focussing. You might get green circle as a confirmation of focus competition or red circle for focus issues.
-
We are specifically looking for scenarios where tapping and forcing the auto-focus still leads to blurry viewfinder and/or blurry pictures.
I’ll give this a go. Somewhat ashamed to admit, but I switched to an iPhone 8 Plus (refurbished 
) recently for my daily driver, partly due to this.
I would encourage others to take a video as well. Simply grab the app, have it start recording, then reproduce the issue with the camera not autofocusing-on-tap, then stop recording and post it (I use Google Photos - easy to share from there after it auto-uploads).
Very cool to see some dev interest in fixing this!
2 Likes
All right, here we go! LOTS of fun here in this capture. (I hope it entertains a few devs at least 
)
In this, I can easily reproduce both ends of it - working, and not working. Like always (and is my complaint), it seems totally random. It’ll get stuck in focus-lock, reporting random success (green frame)/failure (red frame) during periods when it’s not performing any focusing at all. I wonder if it’s stuck trying to “fine focus” and failing to do so, but not falling back to a coarse focus sweep instead. I seem to knock it out of its focus-lock almost literally, by pointing at some distant focus point then back to the subject. That often either gets it into, or out of, focus-lock.
Now, if I can just get my turntable to be a little less jerky with its speed adjustments… maybe I can get it to play smoothly again 
(most of it is code I wrote 10 years ago, so… yeah no i had no idea what PID was. Maybe time to tune that!)
1 Like
Thanks a ton @FalconFour . That video seems to catch both scenarios. Have passed it on. Lets see what we come back with (will take some time though).
1 Like
Quick question - did you have SW6 (original firmware) or SW16 installed on your phone when you took that video?
I’m on SW16. Updated it as soon as it came out.
1 Like
I will see what I can do
1 Like
Just to throw in my two cents - the camera remains my biggest complaint about this thing. It was so bad I had to buy my wife a different phone. I continue to limp along with mine, (using OpenCamera and SW16). At it’s absolute best it manages to take merely passable pictures in bright sunlight. Anything less than mid-day sun though and it’s just horrible, which supports the sensor issue argument in my mind.
I went to a Cars and Coffee today and despite months of evidence to the contrary, I still try to take pictures with this potato and I’m disappointed every time. I’m not a huge picture taker by modern standards, so it might actually make it worse for me since the times that I do, I want it to work.
The big selling point for me on the Teracube, and a key component to sustainability, was the idea of component swapping. So where is my better camera module? I will buy it right now. Barring that, I will likely be calling this a failed experiment and just get last year’s Pixel when they go on sale at the end of the year.
3 Likes
Supposedly, the 2E was meant to be a cheap phone, and a proper, more expensive “2” is somewhere on the horizon. The 2E might be relegated to being a kid’s phone instead - a cheap phone that isn’t terrible when a kid breaks it. The repair service offering is pretty amazing - provided Teracube can actually repair, not replace, a device that breaks (so far, not the case - when I had warranty service, I got a newly-manufactured phone; was hoping for a refurbished one).
But what we can reasonably hope for is that even with an awful sensor, they can still make the best of it by improving/fixing the software that drives it. As it is now, it’s a bad sensor made worse by bad supplier-provided software/drivers. That’s at least a fixable problem, if they can press their thumb firmly enough on the third-party supplier that wrote the driver for it. (at least, that’s my educated guess as to where the problem lies)
I really hope that dream can come true.
1 Like
Yeah. Ultimately I try to keep the purchase price in mind. I bought it early enough in the Kickstarter that I got it for a hundred bucks (or two hundred if you consider that my wife’s phone is now sitting in a box unused), and I know any other phone for hundred would be a piece of garbage. This is honestly so reasonably capable in every other way, I guess it makes the camera stand out even more.
I came from an LG G5, so I’d been using five year old tech and the capabilities were a lateral move (in fact the 2e and G5 benchmark almost exactly the same), but with modern OS and a better battery. It goes back to my original complaint though which is even much, much older phones had better cameras. My old HTC One M7 or even the EVO took better pictures and that was up to a decade ago.
1 Like
The quality of the cameras is my only major complaint against the 2e. I’ve also experienced seemingly random autofocus experience and imagines turning out blue when using the flash on the camera.
I have had the best luck using Open Camera, but best luck in this case means photos that remind me of the camera on my old Palm Treo 700p (I’m exaggerating, but only slightly).
I don’t do much photography on my phone, but when I do it’s usually for quickly documenting something. While I don’t need a great camera, unpredictable autofocus and the inability to use the flash without the entire image turning blue makes the camera on the 2e practically unusable even for documentation purposes.