PinePhone Sample Photos

Yesterday Mobian added in a camera app with support for photos. Yesterday I was unable to get the camera app to work, but today I flashed the latest and greatest nightly image, and I was able to get some sample shots. None of these are edited except for rotation changes because the PinePhone can not shot horizontal photos without editing them.

I'm not a camera expert, but even I can tell that most of the photos are very blurry, and low in dynamic range, and have a lot of noise. They kind of remind me of photos taken from a webcam. But the Camera UI seems good. Photos are very hard to take because the camera app only seems to render the preview at around 1 frame per second, so you have to time your show very well in order to take a photo.

I wanted to get video footage from the PinePhone, but everytime I've tried, GNOME Camera would either freeze or crash, so I was unable to get video.

My first draft of this article was going to just be me dogging on the PinePhone's camera, and I will say that the frame rate is bad right now. But after I looked at other sub $100 such as the Nokia 1.3, and the Alcatel 1X 2019, and the PinePhone's photos are still worse, but not by that much. So considering the PinePhone's price point, and the fact the most of the PinePhone's operating systems barely support the camera, with that in mind, the PinePhone's camera isn't that bad.

I still wouldn't recommend it to anyone, and the camera app on Mobian is still basically a tech demo (like I said in my original article), but overall, they aren't bad for the PinePhone's price point and software limitations.

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