Autofocus is complete 💩 - blurry photos unless tediusly taken

I’m on SW16. Updated it as soon as it came out. :slight_smile:

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I will see what I can do

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.