Verizon Motorola Droid Turbo Photo's Auto focus blurry. Why?

[wolf_walker]

Re: Photo's Auto focus blurry. Why?

I'll get the wife's i4S involved tonight, and I think I have a prosumer cannon and an ancient vintage HP 1mp digicam just for kicks.
And a Nexus 7. I like semi-controlled testing.

 

[PowrDroid]

Re: Photo's Auto focus blurry. Why?

I'll get the wife's i4S involved tonight, and I think I have a prosumer cannon and an ancient vintage HP 1mp digicam just for kicks.
And a Nexus 7. I like semi-controlled testing.

Looking forward to it. I also have a Nexus 7. I should have thrown that one into the mix as well.

 

[PowrDroid]

Re: Photo's Auto focus blurry. Why?

Trying to find objects in motion to test for a blurry picture and have resorted to taking pictures of sports on my TV. Here's a shot of a hockey game. I had the zoom set at about 2.0X. Photo taken in a room with only a 25 watt light on. Therefore almost all the light is coming from the TV. I dunno, I think it's pretty good. Photo was cropped to 1920 px width. Click to enlarge. I see that the photo was also taken with HDR activated.

 

[wolf_walker]

Re: Photo's Auto focus blurry. Why?

I suspect the brightness of the screen itself is helping matters. No arguement from me that given enough light moving pics are fine.
This is why I picked the fan, it was repeatable and handy.

 

[wolf_walker]

Re: Photo's Auto focus blurry. Why?

Canon SX10IS, great little zoom cam, my very talented Wife has taken published photos with this thing despite it's
age and target audience. If anyone is experienced enough to want to compare exif data between the DT and any of these
let me know. Again it looks to me like the no-flash shot shows almost the exact same blur between the DT and the Canon,
but the flash, oh the flash....

Is this a hint at why phone co's are trying dual LED flashes and such? Have they figured out the tiny single LED
flash is woefully inadequate?


No Flash


With Flash


Zoom No Flash


Zoom With Flash

 

[wolf_walker]

Re: Photo's Auto focus blurry. Why?

Hewlett Packard C200
1999.
1, count em, ONE megapixel.
I'm a sucker for $1 thrift store cams.

No Flash, this one actually manages to be worse than the others I've tested so far. As well it should being FIFTEEN years old...


With Flash, yet again, even with a single megapixel to play with and being over a decade old, it still freezes the fan fine.

 

[wolf_walker]

Re: Photo's Auto focus blurry. Why?

Good ole Nexus 7 2013.
Great tablet, crappy camera.
It's actually OK outside for casual use, and better than the HP
Other than artifacting and it being a 5mp or whatever it is, fan blur looks bout the same to me.

No Flash


No With Flash, it has not flash.
It is.
Flashless.

 

[papahood]

Re: Photo's Auto focus blurry. Why?

I also had a hard time focusing on the Christmas tree. How I eventually got it to work was point it at something else in the room that it focused on then slowly moved the phone to the tree and it worked. Didn't change any lighting. A bit of a pain

 

[PowrDroid]

Re: Photo's Auto focus blurry. Why?

Here is a shot of my ceiling fan when the room is fairly brightly lit. Resized photo to 1200 px width and "saved for web" to reduce file size.

 

[PowrDroid]

Re: Photo's Auto focus blurry. Why?

I did a little bit of experimenting today. I closed the drapes in our living room and dining room (north and south side of house) to darken the room. I then had my son roll a multi-colored soccer ball next to me as I walked to get a repeatable rolling speed. In other words, in the pics the ball is rolling at a walking pace, or about 3 mph. The ball is being rolled left-to-right.

I then used the camera on auto-focus, no flash, no drag and focus. Next, I opened the drapes in the dining room (south side) to let in a little bit of light. This light did not reach the area where the ball was rolling but provided some light in the background about 14 feet away. Finally I tried it with the flash on. No retakes, no editing. What you see is what I got. I did resize the pics to 1200 px width and "saved for web" to reduce file size.

I'm not pleased with the results but I'm not bitter about it. I guess it's about what I thought would happen. The biggest concern is the shutter lag. I would get the ball in the center of the frame, tap the screen to take the shot, and then when I review the shot the ball is almost out of the picture.

Here we go....

Drapes closed, both sides of house.







In this shot, I tried to take the shot before the ball crossed in front of me. I was tracking the ball as evidenced by the background blur.




Now the drapes are open in the dining room providing some light from behind me.




This is probably the best shot of the bunch.




Finally, here's one with the drapes open and the flash on. The ball almost got out of the frame before the shot was taken and processed.




Conclusions: The shutter lag is terrible on this camera. If the light is low enough and/or the object being photographed is moving fast enough, you might get a picture of background only with no object in it. The thing about the 21MP camera is that there is enough "real estate" in the photos that you could crop out the parts of excessive background and end up with a decent shot. Like this:



But you shouldn't need to do this. Moto, fix the shutter lag, please!

I wonder how this experiment would play out with other phones, ones considered to have really good cameras, like the Apple 6 or Note 4. I suppose I could try my Maxx HD, but I'm certain the results would be worse.

 

[jamielov]

Re: Photo's Auto focus blurry. Why?

And sadly, thus far, moto doesn't see any of this as an issue. Thats what concerns/upsets me the most

 

[wolf_walker]

Re: Photo's Auto focus blurry. Why?

That's actually better than I expected with the rolling ball.
Focus time is deff an issue, and the DT isn't especially fast at it, two of us noticed it could not focus
or took forever to focus on a moving fan blade. If you could lock focus and have the camera stationary it might be
interesting to see how the rolling ball pic turns out, but I'm not sure one can lock the focus.

I had a Nexus 5, an Iphone 6 and a 6+ in the house over the holiday, wish I'd thought to try this stuff when they were here.

I really want to see results from one of the Nokia's that seem to have such good reputations too. I was half tempted to try a windows
phone before buying the DT.

 

[PowrDroid]

Re: Photo's Auto focus blurry. Why?

And sadly, thus far, moto doesn't see any of this as an issue. Thats what concerns/upsets me the most

They've got to know there are lots of people unsatisfied with the camera and their camera app. I just went to Play Store to see if there was an update for the Moto camera app and there are plenty of scathing reviews.

 

[PowrDroid]

Re: Photo's Auto focus blurry. Why?

That's actually better than I expected with the rolling ball.
Focus time is deff an issue, and the DT isn't especially fast at it, two of us noticed it could not focus
or took forever to focus on a moving fan blade. If you could lock focus and have the camera stationary it might be
interesting to see how the rolling ball pic turns out, but I'm not sure one can lock the focus.

I've read the Lenovo Super Camera App on XDA developers site fixes the shutter lag. I'm afraid to try it though..

 

[wolf_walker]

Re: Photo's Auto focus blurry. Why?

For folks that are really having a regular problem with this, kids sporting moments being missed and such, you might resort to just taking a video and grabbing stills out of it later. The slo-mo is pretty neat and the 4K seems to work well in my limited testing.
The slo-mo is actually a riot if one has dogs and such.

 

[jamielov]

Re: Photo's Auto focus blurry. Why?

For folks that are really having a regular problem with this, kids sporting moments being missed and such, you might resort to just taking a video and grabbing stills out of it later. The slo-mo is pretty neat and the 4K seems to work well in my limited testing.
The slo-mo is actually a riot if one has dogs and such.

Not that I'm disagreeing with what you are suggesting, but doesn't this, sadly, seem like a lot of crap to go through for a useable picture, you know?

 

[wolf_walker]

Re: Photo's Auto focus blurry. Why?

Needs must when the Motorola camera devil drives...

 

[PowrDroid]

Re: Photo's Auto focus blurry. Why?

OK, I am trying hard to get blurry photos of moving objects. No doubt the shutter/photo processing is slow. I was at my Mom's house today and sister had her two dogs over there. Awesome opportunity to test the camera. Room was decently lit, not real bright but good. Camera on drag-to-focus. Pics were reduced in size to 1200 px width.

Oscar, the long-haired dachshund, trotting.




Oscar bounding along at about 3/4 top speed. Really the only blurry photo I took.




Oscar and Betsy sparring.







Yes, the shutter is slow, but I can't condemn the camera as being incapable of taking pictures of moving objects. The dogs were basically wrestling each other with lots of head and body movement.

 

[tntsniper#CB]

Re: Photo's Auto focus blurry. Why?



Horses on the run!

 

[wolf_walker]

Re: Photo's Auto focus blurry. Why?

On the dog pics, I'd bet the white carpet helps with overall light level a lot. My place, and yard, is all dark earth tones that absorb light.
Looks good though.

Re: horse pics, I've been able to take photo's of cars passing on the road, both of us going 45mph or so, and it'll freeze even the wheels.
No explanation, just observation. Distance seems to help some.