Develop Bugs

[Q] cyanogen mod on S4. Camera photo quality downgraded?

Well I'm gonna get straight to the point. Cyanogenmod has downgraded the camera on my Galaxy S4. Photos are significantly noisier and overall lacking in the photo department. I went to Best buy to compare a stock S4 to my CyanogenMod S4 and right there and then my worries were confirmed. Is there any way to keep cyanogen mod and get back the awesome camera quality of the stock S4? The camera downgrade is really getting on my last nerve.
It was the CyanogenMod installed through the play store BTW..

You got a few options
1) ditch CM all together, and use a GPE rom. This is AOSP built by samsung and google. It does not have any of the issues CM has.
now.. some "RDs" on this site insist that the GPE edition roms are TW based, simply because they use the same kernels - this is not true. An adroid 4.3 kernel will work on a 4.3 rom, be it touchwiz, or aosp, and same with Android 4.4
I personally run VirginROM 2.5.4 with a custom kernel that is not allowed on XDA, and my stability is 100%, battery life lasts about 2 or so day with moderate use, and audio/video (what there kernels are known for) rock. These kernels do not overclock, but excel over others that do overclock when it comes to performance.
2) compile the focal camera app yourself and deal with all the CM issues, flaws, and "hybrid" merges...
3) purchased/download a 3rd party app from the google play store

shadowcandy said:
Well I'm gonna get straight to the point. Cyanogenmod has downgraded the camera on my Galaxy S4. Photos are significantly noisier and overall lacking in the photo department. I went to Best buy to compare a stock S4 to my CyanogenMod S4 and right there and then my worries were confirmed. Is there any way to keep cyanogen mod and get back the awesome camera quality of the stock S4? The camera downgrade is really getting on my last nerve.
It was the CyanogenMod installed through the play store BTW..
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First off, no kidding. This did not need a new thread to be discussed. There are literally a thousand posts abotu camera quality with CM ROMS on the various S4 variant forums. Any search at all would have shown you the answer. Here's an example with posts from less than a week ago that explains this throughly.
Second, if this gets on your last nerve, get rid of CM and return to stock. This is the price of using CM. The camera isn't as good. Complaining about it and acting like CM owes you a better camera is downright rude to the CM team who gives you their ROM for free out of a desire to give a gift to the world. They don't owe you a thing.
The short version to your question abotu getting the CM camera back is simply no.
The long version is...
The issue with the camera in AOSP ROMS is that the stock TouchWiz camera has all kinds of proprietary software driving it. That software is built into different parts of the rom and absolutely requires the TouchWiz framework to run. (Which is also proprietary). You can't just pull the APK out of TouchWiz and install it on AOSP.
So there is no way to get the stock TW camera to run on any AOSP rom.
This means that any other app that is using the camera is using generic software to run the camera hardware. This leaves out the ability to do things that the TW software was specifically written to do like crisp auto focus and color depth and all those goodies that make the TW camera better. All that software was written specificly for the S4 hardware.
The Cyanogen camera or the Google stock camera is just an app using generic software not written specificly for this phone's camera hardware. That's no different than ANY other camera you can find on Google Play. They are ALL using generic software.
As a result, none of them are every going to be as crisp as the TouchWiz camera software. They almost all still take a really good picture with this phone, and many give various effects you might enjoy, but if you are looking the actual stock camera app that takes a higher resolution, better focused picture than the CM camera, you're not going to be able to do it.
Even with all that, the S4 camera hardware with CM camera software It's still better than most other phones on the market.
At the end of the day, it's not a camera that makes phone calls. It's a phone that has a camera in it. If photography is that big of a deal to you, you're never going to be happy with anything other than a true SLR. There's nothing wrong with that, mind you. But please stop complaining about the quality of the free ROM that har dworking developers put together in their spare time and gave to you as a gift with no questions or strings atatched.

Well Said !!
I appreciate the way you explained. :good:
Skipjacks said:
First off, no kidding. This did not need a new thread to be discussed. There are literally a thousand posts abotu camera quality with CM ROMS on the various S4 variant forums. Any search at all would have shown you the answer. Here's an example with posts from less than a week ago that explains this throughly.
Second, if this gets on your last nerve, get rid of CM and return to stock. This is the price of using CM. The camera isn't as good. Complaining about it and acting like CM owes you a better camera is downright rude to the CM team who gives you their ROM for free out of a desire to give a gift to the world. They don't owe you a thing.
The short version to your question abotu getting the CM camera back is simply no.
The long version is...
The issue with the camera in AOSP ROMS is that the stock TouchWiz camera has all kinds of proprietary software driving it. That software is built into different parts of the rom and absolutely requires the TouchWiz framework to run. (Which is also proprietary). You can't just pull the APK out of TouchWiz and install it on AOSP.
So there is no way to get the stock TW camera to run on any AOSP rom.
This means that any other app that is using the camera is using generic software to run the camera hardware. This leaves out the ability to do things that the TW software was specifically written to do like crisp auto focus and color depth and all those goodies that make the TW camera better. All that software was written specificly for the S4 hardware.
The Cyanogen camera or the Google stock camera is just an app using generic software not written specificly for this phone's camera hardware. That's no different than ANY other camera you can find on Google Play. They are ALL using generic software.
As a result, none of them are every going to be as crisp as the TouchWiz camera software. They almost all still take a really good picture with this phone, and many give various effects you might enjoy, but if you are looking the actual stock camera app that takes a higher resolution, better focused picture than the CM camera, you're not going to be able to do it.
Even with all that, the S4 camera hardware with CM camera software It's still better than most other phones on the market.
At the end of the day, it's not a camera that makes phone calls. It's a phone that has a camera in it. If photography is that big of a deal to you, you're never going to be happy with anything other than a true SLR. There's nothing wrong with that, mind you. But please stop complaining about the quality of the free ROM that har dworking developers put together in their spare time and gave to you as a gift with no questions or strings atatched.
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Will Custom ROMs be able to get the best out of the G3

In your opinion, will custom ROMs be able to get the best out of the G3? Will we see a bunch of the hardware go utilised? Will we lose laser autofocus? Will the large screen become a burden? Have any of the G2 developers, or any developers for that matter committed to picking up the G3?

sabret00the said:
In your opinion, will custom ROMs be able to get the best out of the G3? Will we see a bunch of the hardware go utilised? Will we lose laser autofocus? Will the large screen become a burden? Have any of the G2 developers, or any developers for that matter committed to picking up the G3?
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Typically, we can see two kind of custom ROMs on popular phone (And I think the G3 will be very popular).
-> Stock "light" rom, debloated but keeping all the interesting hardware features, and retaining the stock look and feel (TouchWiz for Sammy, Sense for HTC, etc.)
-> AOSP rom, based on pure Android, and you lose all the specific features of your phone.
It would take very good developers to mix these two, I'm still hopeful but I haven't seen any convincing mix for any phone so far.

G3 - slow or not ?

I'm thinking of buying a 32gb G3 but I really don't like slowdowns, lag, stutter or whatever. What is your experience with the G3 updated to Lollipop ? The same laggy experience ? Speaking about frame rate in heavy graphics games, opening/closing/switching apps, scrolling things, in fact the general 'responsiveness' ?
What about a rooted G3, with Cyangonmod. Any difference in performance ?
Or should I better look at the G2(rooted to kill bloatware) / S5 / Xperia Z2 / Oneplus one ?

I wouldn't say it's laggy but no matter what rom i use wether cyanogen or stock it's still not as fast as my friends stock one plus one

With cyanogenmod based roms the g3 is amazing. Not lag

plz update to last version 20i not lag

The stock LG firmware is prone to slight lag and animation stuttering, though it opens, closes and runs tasks quite well. It appears to improve as LG roll the updates, and there is a promise of a fresh new UI coming with the G4, but it's still not good enough for a flagship phone.
Now, the moment you run CM12, RR or any other AOSP based rom the phone performs as it's supposed to. Animations are perfectly fluid, everything just flies. It literally feels like a hardware upgrade.
The phone is really great, I wouldn't consider any other 5.5 screen (or up) because of the size of the devices. LG made something special here, though It's a bit sad that they haven't figured out the software side of things just yet, but we have hopes things are going for the better.

igor_anta said:
The stock LG firmware is prone to slight lag and animation stuttering, though it opens, closes and runs tasks quite well. It appears to improve as LG roll the updates, and there is a promise of a fresh new UI coming with the G4, but it's still not good enough for a flagship phone.
Now, the moment you run CM12, RR or any other AOSP based rom the phone performs as it's supposed to. Animations are perfectly fluid, everything just flies. It literally feels like a hardware upgrade.
The phone is really great, I wouldn't consider any other 5.5 screen (or up) because of the size of the devices. LG made something special here, though It's a bit sad that they haven't figured out the software side of things just yet, but we have hopes things are going for the better.
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I heard you lose all the camera quality and features like laser autofocus when you switch to AOSP, is this true?

oxxshadow said:
I heard you lose all the camera quality and features like laser autofocus when you switch to AOSP, is this true?
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I can't say about the laser focus because last I heard someone confirmed it's working. There is loss in quality for low light photos, but bright photos are as good as stock. Also there is no 4K recording yet.
Camera was never my thing though, so I didn't give it a proper test run.

Thanks for the answers. I'll have to choose between the S5 and the G3. The Xperia Z2 and OPO were also options, but these are just too big. And most likely the OP2 will be bigger. Let's see which of them gets cheaper quicker...

Current state of OP3 camera

I've read a lot about the OOS camera and the various cameras in non OOS ROMs (CM, Aosp, etc). I was wondering if we have gotten to a point where they perform similarly. I've heard mixed opinions.
Also why does OnePlus not release the camera source? They eventually released dash charging source, so I'm curious as to why they wouldn't do the same for the camera?

From what i've experienced, almost all well-lit shots (Both outdoor and indoor) perform almost as well on non-OOS ROMs as they do on OOS. For the discerning eye, OOS shots are still more crisp, but there is enough of a parity there that i don't think most people would notice. Any shot that isn't well-lit, OOS has non-OOS beat. Sometimes by a little, sometimes by a wide margin. In poor lighting, the non-OOS ROMs have gotten better, but it's still pretty clear that OOS is the better performer. Almost all of the issues with these shots come down to the noise cancellation.
When it comes to video, it's a mixed bag. On OOS 3.5.3 community build, the 1080P 60fps mode is amazingly fluid, and for the most part fantastic. The 4k mode is decent from what i can tell, although i don't really use it that much. The slow motion mode is great. On non-OOS ROMs, it depends on the ROM really. SultanXDA's ROM with his custom HAL probably has the best performance as far as video goes. The built-in camera app does a decent job at 1080p video and the 4k seems OK, but again, i don't use that mode very often. Video performance in other camera apps seems decent. On OOS 3.2.6, i had some issues with video performance though, so it's not all roses there if that's the version you're running.
Carl Pei has made it clear on Twitter and on a Reddit AMA that OnePlus will never release a fully open source camera stack. I suspect that this probably has to do with proprietary noise suppression algorithms and some other proprietary optimizations that OnePlus has engineered. It needs to be mentioned that the camera hardware is only one part of the equation when it comes to camera performance. There are a number of software components that go into a full camera experience. There really needs to be both to get full utilization out of a piece of camera hardware. As far as i've heard, OnePlus is "looking at ways" to bring the full OOS camera experience to non-OOS ROMs, but nobody really knows what that entails as of yet.

tesherx said:
From what i've experienced, almost all well-lit shots (Both outdoor and indoor) perform almost as well on non-OOS ROMs as they do on OOS. For the discerning eye, OOS shots are still more crisp, but there is enough of a parity there that i don't think most people would notice. Any shot that isn't well-lit, OOS has non-OOS beat. Sometimes by a little, sometimes by a wide margin. In poor lighting, the non-OOS ROMs have gotten better, but it's still pretty clear that OOS is the better performer. Almost all of the issues with these shots come down to the noise cancellation.
When it comes to video, it's a mixed bag. On OOS 3.5.3 community build, the 1080P 60fps mode is amazingly fluid, and for the most part fantastic. The 4k mode is decent from what i can tell, although i don't really use it that much. The slow motion mode is great. On non-OOS ROMs, it depends on the ROM really. SultanXDA's ROM with his custom HAL probably has the best performance as far as video goes. The built-in camera app does a decent job at 1080p video and the 4k seems OK, but again, i don't use that mode very often. Video performance in other camera apps seems decent. On OOS 3.2.6, i had some issues with video performance though, so it's not all roses there if that's the version you're running.
Carl Pei has made it clear on Twitter and on a Reddit AMA that OnePlus will never release a fully open source camera stack. I suspect that this probably has to do with proprietary noise suppression algorithms and some other proprietary optimizations that OnePlus has engineered. It needs to be mentioned that the camera hardware is only one part of the equation when it comes to camera performance. There are a number of software components that go into a full camera experience. There really needs to be both to get full utilization out of a piece of camera hardware. As far as i've heard, OnePlus is "looking at ways" to bring the full OOS camera experience to non-OOS ROMs, but nobody really knows what that entails as of yet.
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Thanks for the excellent explanation!

Also worth considering that the camera isn't manufactured by one plus, can't remember what off hand who's sensor they're using, so they would need manufacturers permission to release driver source.

ghostofcain said:
Also worth considering that the camera isn't manufactured by one plus, can't remember what off hand who's sensor they're using, so they would need manufacturers permission to release driver source.
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Rear camera sensor is SONY IMX298 Exmor RS
Front camera sensor is SONY IMX179
On topic: i have always used Nexus and loved changing ROMs and trying new roms. With oneplus 2 i could do it, because of a good camera port, but in this phone... OOS is a must if you want to take decent pictures
Oos 3.5.2 camera is insanely good and super fast. Really its faster than iphone 6s plus camera with oos
Luckily we have xposed framework, so we can customize our op3 using oos roms, but yeah... It kinda sucks we have to use oos just because of camera. It doesnt matter app you use in custom roms, it will lack libs, drivers etc...
Same as FPS. OOS is insanely fast but with any custom ROM (even with released sources) its slower (still fast but i notice that difference)
Edit: btw oos is a pretty nice ROM.
Lacks customization? Yes, but xposed framework will do that

compared to S7 or HTC 10 the OnePlus3 camera sux

Only For camera I can't use any Custom rom
Sadly comment here.. Cz i tasted all rom here and There iso no good camera custom rom.. all custom camera sucks ?..
Now i am using 3.2.4 cz 3.2.6 camera also missing focus on right place.. and I love to capture regular macro shot via my mobile...
But i buy it also tested custom rom.. but i can'T!! only for bad camera ??

How does having the released mi5s kernel help in the camera department?

Hi.
I'm using EU MIUI 7.3.30 and it's not bad, but I would much prefer using a non-MIUI ROM such a LineageOS.
However, all the AOSP variants using the stock kernel (LOS,RR...) until now have had mediocre to faulty camera implementations and I've tested many camera apps at that - Piximod mark IV, stock LOS, stock RR, Google camera, a better camera, open camera, manual camera... None of them are able to hold a candle to the stock camera app under MIUI in terms of having everything (video,RAW,HDR,panorama...) working flawlessly under one app.
I'm not even sure if this will change now that we have the released kernel for the mi5s, so please help me understand the following:
1. Does having the released kernel potentially help in getting a better camera experience under LOS, RR or a similar ROM versus using the stock kernel from MIUI? How so?
2. Does having the released kernel potentially help in porting the stock MIUI camera app under LOS/RR?
3. Does having the released kernel potentially help in getting a *better* camera implementation than currently under stock camera app MIUI by better utilizing the camera2API (from my understanding the stock camera app in MIUI doesn't use V2 of the camera API)?
4. Does having the released kernel potentially allow one to port the Pixel camera app?
Thanks all

I think you should create this thread into the Question & Answer Section.
But for your question regarding the kernels and implementation for los / rr, yes indeed it'll help for dev to use new released kernel from xiaomi, since the kernel is made specifically for mi5s hardware optimization and function.
Yes and yes, the bottom line is the kernel will give us huge advantage rather than use stock kernel like we use right now if we use los / rr, for the camera of course there will be some improvements, not only the camera, fingerprint, ambient display, multi touch, etc will improve.

As far as I understand the source doesnt contain every information.
Open source sounds cool yeah. But take Amazons FireTV as an example. There is a source code available because of GPL, however they only share the source of the stuff they have to share and nothing else. So source doesnt mean, the source code of everything.
As a better example you can take the Google Pixel. You would expect that the VERY Android device itself should have source code of everything available. Like the Google Camera Software and algorithm that could be used for the Mi5S since both share the same Sony Sensor. Sounds awesome right? Sadly Google, doesn't share this particular piece of source code/drivers.
And when I talked with LuK about source, he was not very optimistic. It is because the Qualcomm Fingerprint reader is also closed. Which is why he said "Qfp will still be a mess"
So.. Long story short. It will still be a custom rom with its disadvantages. But I believe that it will contribute a lot in terms of stability. Phone calling , no force closes and sudden reboots.
I mean after all these years on xda , everyone should already got used to "everything works. Stable build. not working : camera etc"
This will not change I think. In fact it will get more complicated and the list of troublesome things will get longer as phones get more and more features with closed source. Fingerprint reader is such a thing for instance. and More advanced sensors in the future etc..
So there are two options:
1) Either you stick with your current phone and try to make it work and live with its downsides. Maybe after 3 to 5 years, almost everything will be supported or maybe not. Although by then the phone will most likely be obsolete and any 100$ phone will beat it.
Go back 5 years. Would you still bother with a Samsung Galaxy S2 or S3?
2) Just get a phone that has proper company support from the start and use the phone at its full potential right away. Like the Google Pixel. However it costs more. So you have to weigh the Pros and Cons. Do you want to spend more money or more time and headaches. Everyone has to make a decision there.
As for me: I know that I drop and break expensive stuff. So I buy cheap phones. xD