replace outdated camera information

It doesn't make sense to go into so much detail about the past
generation devices, especially now that the specialized Pixel Visual
Core and Pixel Neural Core have been replaced with the standard DSP
hardware.
This commit is contained in:
Daniel Micay 2021-08-18 11:08:07 -04:00
parent 17c6540d4f
commit 058661d140

View File

@ -499,34 +499,30 @@
it's going to be replaced. In the short term, there are other apps available providing
more capabilities and better support for taking advantage of the hardware.</p>
<p>Open Camera is somewhat more advanced and much more configurable. You should
make sure to configure it to use the Camera2 API since it uses the legacy camera
APIs by default for broader compatibility with devices. It isn't currently able to
make use of special purpose cameras and doesn't have any advanced image capturing
or processing technology. It has a traditional software-based HDR mode which
captures 3 images and merges them in a way that isn't at all intelligent and
causes a lot of blur and distortion. You probably don't want to use this unless
you have a way to mount the phone in a stable position and aren't taking a picture
of anything that's not almost entirely still.</p>
<p>Google Camera can be used with the <a href="#sandboxed-play-services">sandboxed
Play services compatibility layer</a>.</p>
Play services compatibility layer</a> and can take full advantage of the available
cameras and image processing hardware as it can on the stock OS. Other camera apps
could provide the same image quality and features but there aren't any comparable
alternatives in practice. HDR+ is enabled by default and is a much more advanced
replacement for HDR taking bursts of pictures and intelligently combining those
which is what makes the image quality so much higher, especially for low light.
The Night Sight feature is essentially the same thing, but with the light of the
picture unnaturally increased through combining the data.</p>
<p>The Pixel 3 (but not the Pixel 3a) and Pixel 4 (but not the Pixel 4a) have a
Pixel Visual Core / Pixel Neural Core providing a hardware-based implementation of
HDR+. HDR+ captures many images and intelligently merges data across them, taking
into account motion, etc. It substantially improves the quality of images,
especially in low light. This is used transparently for third party apps that are
compatible with it, and there isn't an explicit switch to turn it on or off for
most of them. An example of a compatible app is Open Camera's default
configuration, or Open Camera with the Camera 2 API and other settings (including
the the various knobs / toggles outside of the settings menu) left alone. In
general, HDR+ will work transparently in most apps as long as they keep things
simple and use a good minimalist approach to taking pictures. It should work
transparently in most messaging apps, etc. with internal support for taking
pictures.</p>
<p>In addition to supporting HDR+ via the Pixel Visual Core, or similar features on
other devices with the same constraints, Open Camera offers advanced configuration and
various advanced features. Make sure to enable the Camera 2 API in the settings, which
should be the default, but the app doesn't have a great user interface / user
experience. You probably don't want to use the traditional HDR feature in the app.
That's not HDR+, but rather captures 3 images and merges them in a way that isn't at
all intelligent and causes a lot of blur and distortion. The HDR+ implementation can
actually benefit from the camera not being completely steady as it's smart enough to
match up the picture and it provides it with more data vs. a traditional HDR
implementation where it essentially doesn't work without a tripod and is not really at
all useful on a phone unless you actually have that for it.</p>
<p>Since there isn't a project making a serious, high quality open source camera
app able to even compete with Google Camera without HDR+ and the fancy features,
GrapheneOS is considering funding the creation of a new app as a replacement for
the AOSP Camera app.</p>
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