Wednesday, May 27, 2009

SnapPhoto - Doing it's part to improve the G1's camera

I have lots of things I like about my G1. It's a fantastic phone - but it has one major flaw: the camera is awful.

I know, I know, I shouldn't be depending on a cell phone camera for quality. Why not? The wifi and GPS work great. The web browsing is quite powerful. The camera is a 3+ megapixel camera, why can't it behave like one?

And here's the part that really gets me - Shira's Blackerry's camera does wondefully. Even the flash works well on it. Low light, inside, outside, whatever, it takes perfectly reasonable photos.

The G1, under perfect lighting does OK. But that lighting can't be outdoors, too low, etc. or you end up with junk.

My buddy Nick suggested a solution: buy the SnapPhotoPro app. Boy, was he right. Best 99 cents I've ever spent.

This app gives the G1's camera a fighting chance. You can tweak the color balance and color levels of the photos, which is huge. It also has better shutter control - at times, I find it frustrating just getting the built it camera to snap a photo. Any photo.

If you use the camera on the G1 you need this app.

Perhaps the next software upgrade, Cupcake, will fix all these issues. Though, I'm not optimistic. In the mean time, I'm going to continue to play with SnapPhoto and hope for the best.

1 comment:

  1. yes I'm very proud of my recommendation... 6 days ago my regular digital camera took a nose dive and died on our trip in India. The G1 with SnapPhoto pro is not a perfect replacement but it works great. Plus the white balance tools are great.And if you set the focus to 'PreFocus' the picture taking is much faster. Well I'm happy that SnapPhoto is working out for you cause it is definitely working for me... I'll post some pictures tow flickr later that I've taken from my G with SnapPhoto.

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