Hi everyone. OK, so there's been a lot of chatter
about the Nexus 5 camera and, you know, I've said my own
two cents worth about it as it were that
realistically the camera isn't a problem
so much as the setup that Google provided
as default on the Nexus 5. It needs a bit of
tweaking. Now brilliantly as always the guys over at the XDA Developers forums
have been beavering away
and they've already produced a patch which in my opinion
radically improves the quality of the Nexus 5 camera.
It adds more sharpness, it increases the bitrate of images and videos
and also increases the lock on for the
auto focus as well. It locks on much faster than it used to.
Now later on today I will be taking another round of pictures
and I will upload those onto our Google+ page so you can have a look at them but for
now what I'm going to do is I'm going to show you
how to apply this patch. Now the first thing you need to make sure
is that your Nexus 5 is rooted and has a recovery
custom recovery on there. I think there is only one custom recovery at the moment
which is touch recovery.
Rooting, not something we go through on this channel
there are plenty of videos out there about how to do it and also on the XDA forum
there's a couple of simple rooting methods if you want them or you can go down the more
complex ADB and fast food route.
So the first thing we need to do is we have to make sure we downloaded
this updated package from the XDA developers.
Have a look in the comments check the annotation, there's a link there, go and get the
download. Now
put the download onto your Nexus 5 and reboot into
your touch recovery. So I'm quickly just
going to use Rom Toolbox to get into there so reboot into recovery.
If you're rooted and you don't have Rom Toolbox,
you really do need it. It's fantastic, very very quick and easy to make
lots and lots of changes that only require root access and saves you having to have lots and
lots of different
apps to do this stuff. Now, once you're into touch recovery or teaming recovery project
go into install. You need to
find where you put the file. Now if you downloaded it via your handset it will be in your
downloads file.
Select and then what it's basically going to do
is it's going to flash this update onto the device replacing the previous settings
for the camera.
Bear in mind rooting, flashing and things like that
does tend to have an impact on your warranty. Don't do this
if you're not completely confident of how you would then fix your device
should something go wrong like a boot loop. Now check and make sure that
everything is correct. It is the correct file for instance, you don't want to be flashing
something random. It is called the Nexus 5 cam fix.
If you want to, you can add more zips at this point, if you've got other things you
want to
flash at the same time but my personal feeling is only ever flash one file
at a time. So to flash it
we scroll that across and that's it done, it's a
blink and you'll miss it so once the update is installed you can check the zip install
is complete at the top
and there's a log out at the bottom there just letting you know exactly what it's done.
You can then just reboot the system and that's it, you're done. So now when you're going to use your
Nexus 5 camera
you will find that the images are much sharper, the sharpness has been changed from
a value of 70 to a value of 90 so that's nearly I think a 23% increase in the sharpness of the
images
and the bit rate has been increased as well, by around seven or eight
megabits
I think it is. If that's correct. Megabits? I think it is megabits.
But my point is this: what Google provided to us out of the box
is not optimal for the camera. The settings can be improved quite a bit,
maybe Google will patch that for all handsets coming up
in the next update perhaps. Or, if you need to,
you can just go and flash this zip on from the XDA Developers
and you will fix your camera quite nicely. In the tests I've done,
I found that the speed at which it locks on is
greatly improved and the accuracy is a lot better as well. Generally
if you've got a faster lock on with the autofocus you're going to have more
good quality pictures then you are bad or, you know, less time
faffing around. The higher bitrate does make a bit of a difference, it's not a
massive difference but
it's an appreciable difference and personally I think this is
closer to where the Nexus 5 camera software should be.