10 June 2015

Motherboard: “Why Android camera phones still suck”

Given all these supposed improvements you might have expected Android cameras to have caught up to Apple’s. Surely this year’s non-iPhone won’t embarrass me in low-light social settings, you think. Well, it’s complicated.


Android phones do have good cameras, but what we need is better software. RAW support allows us to see what these cameras are technically capable of, but until we can trust phone makers to invest in quality processing algorithms, Android cameras will continue to lag behind Apple and Microsoft’s.

Evan Rodgers

As most experienced photographers know, a great photo takes more than a good sensor. Image processing is a big part of that, and if the in-camera result is bad, it’s very hard to fix it afterwards. While for photographers it’s nice to have original RAW files to work with, most smartphone users just want good results immediately, not hours or days later after downloading and tweaking the files on a desktop PC.

Shot on iPhone 6 by Jin C.

I find it hard to believe that none of the Android manufacturers (with the possible exception of Sony) managed to develop good image processing software – or bothered to license it from one of the digital camera producers. But then again, if they were good at software, they wouldn’t need to use ’s operating system on their devices…

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