Terrible quality on low light or night photos on my S5 (Examples)

[cgg074]

When I take photos at night with my S5, the quality is terrible. Very noisy pics, specially on the edges. During the day or when there is a lot of light, the photos are beautiful.
This doesn't happen with my Note 4 which takes beautiful pics, even at night.
Is there something wrong with my S5?
Here are a three examples. Look at the borders. Very grainy and pink/violet color. Is it something with the camera when using high ISO?
Thanks!

 

[cgg074]

Anyone?

 

[Haalcyon]

Which of the S5's 'modes' are you shooting in?

 

[cgg074]

Which of the S5's 'modes' are you shooting in?

Auto

And the Image Stabilization is off.

I think it has to do with the high ISO. I have it un Auto and when is dark, the ISO goes up to 2,000.

 

[Haalcyon]

Whoa. Are you manually able to reduce the ISO to, say, 800?

 

[cgg074]

Whoa. Are you manually able to reduce the ISO to, say, 800?

Yes I can and if I do the pics turn out great. Although a bit on the dark side. The problem is when the auto ISO goes above 2,000 with no flash.

If I use the flash, the pics turn out great.

 

[Haalcyon]

Yes I can and if I do the pics turn out great. Although a bit on the dark side. The problem is when the auto ISO goes above 2,000 with no flash.

If I use the flash, the pics turn out great.

Ah, I no longer have the great S5. Perhaps someone else with an S5 can chime in and show some of their results so you can see if you have an anomaly. For now, you may have to bring the ISO down manually if you want to take those sneaky clandestine stealth night shots.

 

[P_Devil]

I leave my S5 set to auto for low light/night shots but turn on image stabilization (no flash). I've put some of my shots below. They weren't taken in complete darkness but you can at least see what my S5 is doing. None of the pictures I'm posting have gone through post-processing, they are all as-is directly from the camera using Samsung's camera app.

This is a concert where the only light sources were from the stage which consisted of black lights, purple lights, and some blue lights.


Here's my local zoo during their festival of lights. The light sources are from the Christmas lights which are various colored LED strands and the occasional sidewalk light (about one every 150 ft were lit up).



Lastly, these are pictures taken during the fireworks display after a Reds game in Great American Ballpark. The light sources here are the fireworks and electronic scoreboards below us. There is one picture with the main scoreboard lit up and that one looks OK, the other (after they turned off the main scoreboard) is grainy, lacking detail, and a little washed out.

 

[cgg074]

Thanks for the pics! Nice by the way!

Can you take a picture on a very dark room or place? With all the settings on Auto.

By the way, I'm running Kit Kat 4.4.2

 

[P_Devil]

The results wouldn't be any better than yours, I can already tell you that. I have always found that low light shots are problems for smartphone cameras in general. My iPhone 5 was said to have the best camera for low light photos back in 2012 and it too took terrible shots when left on auto. I have a Sony alpha compact mirror-less camera and it also takes pretty bad shots at night when left on auto.

You will have to mess with the settings in order to get things right. The only thing I turned on was anti motion blur and the flash was turned off. I didn't adjust any ISO settings or anything else, just the anti motion blur through Samsung's camera app. I am running Android 4.4.4 but Samsung hasn't changed their app at all. I started off with 4.4.2 and it's the same app now as it was when I first purchased my phone.

 

[cgg074]

Can someone take a picture in a completely dark room or just cover the lense when taking a picture to see if the results are the same with auto settings.

Thanks!

 

[Detectionable]

Can someone take a picture in a completely dark room or just cover the lense when taking a picture to see if the results are the same with auto settings.

Thanks!

Phone flat on the desk so lens covered, all settings on Auto

 

[Haalcyon]

Phone flat on the desk so lens covered, all settings on Auto

http://i.imgur.com/9xX1LlX.jpg

It's so.... Dark.

 

[Northern.dj]

Ok i have been having a play and yes it can get a bit grainny but i no why
OK here is a Pic of my G19 gaming keyboard taken by my oldGalaxy S3

And now from my S5

The S3 was set to the same size but the file size was 848KB
The S5 file size was 2.42KB
and i reduced the Megapixel down to 12m on the S5
16M it did get ver7 grainy and it seems to zoom in as well
I have had better shots on a lower mega pixel at night if its close if its at a distance the 16M works
with Dark More can be to much

 

[Detectionable]

It's so.... Dark.

Good photo though

 

[monicakm]

Low light shots are a challenge for any real (as in dedicated) camera, much less a phone camera. dSLRs of course do a better job because they introduce less noise at higher ISOs but point and shoot and bridge cameras struggle at best. But, what's acceptable to one person may not be acceptable to another. The higher the ISO, the more grain in the photo. Being able to select an extremely low shutter speed so that you can keep your ISO low, and have IS, a steady hand or a tripod is the only way to get a "good" low light photo. A good noise reducing program can do wonders! Had I put my camera on auto pilot for this shot it would have chosen an iso of 1600. Grainy but still not as bad as the S5s low light and Topaz deNoise can take care of the noise really well without much loss of detail. There's only so much a phone cam can do.

These pictures were too large to send to the forum but at full size, but there was no noise in either shot. Techincally the 250 iso should have had more than the 80 iso but it wasn't noticeable.

ps...these are SOOC except to resize. A second or two in a photo editing program could have brightened these up and with a little Unsharp mask, made the image sharper.

 

[P_Devil]

It's so.... Dark.

It's like, how much more black could this be? and the answer is none. None more black.

 

[Daaniel Tran]

It's just the phone. Mine is like that too. The phone boasted superior camera quality but my iPhone 4s was better than this camera under low light. It's really disappointing actually. I hardly use the camera just because I own this phone.

 

[Haalcyon]

Hmmm. When i had an S5 I was happy with the camera quality. However, I wasn't trying to take pictures in the dark.

 

[cgg074]

Phone flat on the desk so lens covered, all settings on Auto

http://i.imgur.com/9xX1LlX.jpg

Thats really dark. Definitely there's something wrong with my camera.
:-(