Android L to feature Raw shooting and added manual camera controls

sdh:

If you have the opportunity, try shooting raw and then jpeg with say the Olympus XZ10 or perhaps one of the MicrosoftNokia phones which also shoot DNG. Then note what you can do with the raws that you can't do with the jpegs.

RAW have a big advantage on small sensors, just to start, it is having far better possibilities in throwing away some troublesome habits of the manufacturers like for example aggressive sharpening and over saturated colors.

After the real advantage with RAW comes with the fact that there is an infinite quantity of applications that can access RAW data on the sensor, so almost infinite competition and so infinite new possibilities to ameliorate the image quality, and far better lifetime for the current cellphones.

Imagine an old SonyEricsson K750i had RAW and Java apps accessing the RAW. I'm sure people would keep it up to today to make experiments and do HDR shoots (impossible at the time).

You can do it with JPEG but now creativity will be even higher.

I would like to apply DxO PRIME on some of my phone pics.

Azurael:

Is the battery easy to swap on any Nexus?

TrojMacReady:

Over a few days of use I've noted Android tablets slowing remarkably, until such time as one limits background processes.

Right, I'm sure there's software that will let you see what crapware is running.

HowaboutRAW:

Well, actually, the battery on my 2012 Nexus 7 is no more difficult to change than any device with an 'officially' removable battery. Just pop the back off. The Nexus 4 is just the two screws in the bottom then the retainers on the battery connector. I don't own a 2013 Nexus 7 or a Nexus 5 and I haven't yet had cause to disassemble my partner's Nexus 10, so I can't comment on those. But if you must have crapware-free Android, don't want to root/install a custom ROM AND MUST have a removable battery or a MicroSD slot, there are always the GPE devices. Although those of us outside the US would have to import them :(

And as for slowdowns over time... The uptime figure on my Nexus 7 is currently at about a month and a half, and it's not feeling any slower than when it was first booted. I don't kill background apps, Android can be trusted to do that itself where necessary these days.

@HowaboutRAW maybe because the cameras are not mature ? Remember smartphones before the iPhone ?

I agree with jtan163, and if cameras now run on Android, we will not loose anything (except to win, Photoshop directly on a Sony A7s).

Juandante:

The problem is all the non-camera functions, and the slow start time. And many of theses functions aren't going to be sought in future cameras.

So MRAM could help with the start time.

The iPhone also released at a time when processors and touch screens had improved. And like Android, the iPhone's OS has many features that don't have much to do with taking pictures.

Everybody understood that small fast, cell networked, computers were coming 20 years ago. And that's about when Apple was selling the respected Newton, but back then even wifi didn't exist, let alone a 3G network--and the first iPhone was not 3G.

No body is saying, "But I want to send emails from my camera", or "play Candy Crush on my camera", or "video chat".

There's nothing particularly wrong with using some part of Android to sort photos on a camera and push them out to a network, so Android can be so part of a camera's OS, but only a limited part and not now while startup is so slow.

You know you (you personally or the manufacturers) don't have to install all the apps?
They can just use the kernel. libraries and a shim layers as required.
They get a kernel, wireless, 3/4G , an imagine pipeline, a GUI toolkit, all of which they can customise.
You realise that margins and sales are dropping?
Easy way to reduce cost of producting a camera - an increase the feature set.

Whats more if you want to break Adobe's image processing strangelhold, what better way to do it then get your OS into cameras, still, video, lightray or otherwise?

jtan163:

Then I have to go through the head ache of rooting the machine and rebuilding the features. When I buy a Mac or a highend Windows computer, they're simply not loaded with crapware.

Same is true of an iPhone.

I seriously don't know what you are talking about, you don't have to use none of the other special features of an Android camera if they have them and second of all the current cameras are IMMATURE, got it ?

It is certain that if Sony, Nikon, Canon, Fuji start to make cameras with Android they will not be as slow and you will find exactly what you find on current cameras in the same exact way (beauty of using a non-proprietary OS).

I don't tell you to put a phone in a camera I told you to put Android in a camera which is completely two different things.

For the moment there is no blocking part (you could tweak Android can go in stand-by to increase boot time with a good battery drain to 0% would take weeks), except the will of the manufacturers and for some people *cough* to be more intelligent.

Juandante:

Android in a camera remains a bad idea. See the various Samsung Galaxy camera examples as to why.

Re: Android phones and tablets, today in 2014, one can not always remove crapware--so one is forced to root the system--a process which raises all sorts of other potential problems.

I suggest you look into Android systems further before making "easy" suggestions about solutions that mostly won't work.

I stand by what I wrote a week ago, above.

Howaboutraw - I think you think that the thing you see on a phone or tablet is the OS.
It's not.
It's a GUI.
The OS is underneath.
I'm not trying to be rude, but it sounds like you are not familiar enough with OS principals to be having this conversation with.
Sorry I'm really not trying to be an ass, but you need to understand the different layers of abstraction e.g. , kernel, libraries, shell GUI, Apps before we can discuss this.

jtan163:

Duh, Android is a GUI on top of a scaled down Linux.

And Mac is a GUI on top of a Unix.

However the way you consistently access functions in Android is thru the GUI--and there ARE NOT radical variations in that system.

If you think that some party, say Samsung, should develop a Linux based OS for its cameras, feel free to advocate for such a system.

You're not being an "ass", just ignorant, which I guess you could see as coming off as an ass.

In slightly different terms, yes Linux/Unix could run a camera as long as it started very quickly and had dedicated physical buttons on the camera. But that's not what you advocated.

Hope this clarifies your apprehension of computer OSes, well some non-Windows varieties.

AH OK then Android it is Linux.
But it is also a whole pile of libraries and APIs, including the imaging libraries.
You don't have to access or include the underlying functions via the GUI as I assume you know.

The GUIs nearly always mucked up by OEM's who just can't resist messing with it.

But the OEMs could choose to not mess with it and replace the GUI layer - and still get all the other benefits of Android.
I don't think Samsung should develop a Linux environment for camera and I am not sugesting they should use Galaxy.

What I am suggesting is that to avoid the expense of developing any OS for a camera they could use Android, stripped down or fattened up and reduce the cost of development.

And that if you were google and wanted to take that market having your own OS in cameras would be an advantage.

In the same way having DNG as a camera RAW format is an advantage for Adobe (they don't have to develop a new raw converter for your camera - less dev cost).

BTW my day job is a unix sys admin, I'm an RHCE. I used to be a programmer and was writing C, C++ (which I no longer do) for embedded Linux systems before Linux had any real facilities for embedded software (distro was about redhat 3 or 4 redhat, not RHEL) for realtime software in the mid/late 90s including a touch screen interface in GTK+.
As such I rather immodestly reckon my grasp of non windows OS's is pretty decent.
I'm not an OS developer but I have a pretty decent grasp of where the various layers of functionality come from and how tightly coupled a GUI is.

Android and OSX both "copied" a real operating system to get their start: Unix.

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/07/examining-project-volta-we-put-android-l-through-our-battery-test/

Android L has project volta, some sites claim it provides an additional 30% of battery life.

This won't save the Nexus 5 though, the battery is simply too small for that screen size.

My Nexus 4 always had good battery life, my G2 running AOSP probably doubles it but that's no surprise with a more efficient SoC and 3000mAh battery. I can't really see that the N5 could be bad unless there's something drastically wrong with it. I shouldn't be getting more than a third extra with the rest of the hardware being pretty much identical.