Sailfish Community News, 18th April 2024 - Xperia 10 IV & V

well, just a properly functioning camera would be nice!

often find:
in low-light the picture never gets taken - seems like it gets stuck in a loop trying to focus.
general delay - can find it sometimes takes 5-10 seconds for a pic to capture, losing the ‘moment’ entirely.

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In my eXperience 10 III SFOS camera needs a perfectly stable image to take a photo.

Low light introduces flickering pixel noise = movement.
General delay in bright light = means it’s just something moving (either operator or the target), so forget all of your action motion shots…
The shutter button becomes grey, and a photo is taken later (as soon as any movement stabilizes or stops).

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as discussed in several threads here, there is a partial solution for the broken focus detection, which is to use camera2 api in android-app-support.
download the android app OpenCamera (or similar), and select Camera2 api from the settings. (also, if you enable the telefoto+wide lenses in camxoverridesettings, you can use them in OpenCamera. just be careful not to select the ‘4th’ lens, which doesn’t exist and will crash the app)

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Maybe implementing a Manual-Focus-Mode in Jolla’s camera app could help users take better action and low-light shots by allowing them to set and hold the focus depth manually. This feature could provide more control and flexibility for users who want to fine-tune their photography settings.

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Do you see / feel any difference if you use physical shutter key from the side?

there is no physical shutter key on the X10III, its a google assistant button (you can patch mce or do other userspace input handling to trigger a camera, but there is no physical focus-half-press button anyway).

it sounds very much like lietuvys is describing the well-document camera1 focus model bug, present only in 10III, that affects both sailfish AND stock sony android, but is not present in camera2 api and thus not a problem in modern (non-sfos) camera apps.
e.g.: https://forum.sailfishos.org/t/camera-refuses-to-take-picture-on-10-iii-focus-hangs

Interesting. Tried to take a photo with bad lighting on 10 III just now: Impossible with normal UI button, tried tapping dozens of times. Tried physical shutter key (ok which might be google assistant button) and no effect there at all, either. Changed to Advanced Camera, took a series of photos, no problem with any of them (changed to auto focus). Interestingly, after using Advanced Camera, now the default Camera succeeds in taking photos in the same setting without any notable delays.

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That very google assistant button works as a shutter key for Xperia 10 III. I recall that we added it already for 4.5, maybe it’s just behind corner (4.6. Sauna) if it is not working.

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from what i understand, since MF is not part of camera1 api. therefore, implementing this in jolla-camera would require using low-level device-specific camera programming, and may not work on any given device. it is unlikely to be feasible to do this way.

the only real solution would be switching to the camera2 api, which is well underway, although far from completion. presumably, with camera2 api, implementing manual focus in the app will be easy.

for now, manual focus works quite well in OpenCamera.

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No it’s not in 4.5, looks like we’ve been waiting for it 15 months (Xperia 10 iii: make Google assistant button a camera trigger - #41 by nephros) and counting

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Yes i tried it also today, out of curiosity, but it wasn’t working. At this point i feel sorry for jolla employees. They’re doing great work and all i can read in this forum is that this isn’t working and that isn’t working. I’m very glad that i can use a linuxphone as a daily driver, with oled display and android support and I’m excited for the 4.6 release and I’m also excited for the xperia 10 iv and v support. I even ordered an xperia 10 v, i hope its audio services are more stable than on 10 iii, so i could give it to my girlfriend as a replacement for her 10 iii. If not i have another device to experiment with and will give her my 10 ii or a gigaset gx 4 pro with sfos, if i manage to get it booting on it. I think i can live with disappearing audio. Thanks to jolla for making this possible. it’s really great fun finding out which device has which advantages and disadvantages. So far i like sfos on the xperia 10 ii the most, but maybe that will change with 10 v, or maybe even iv.

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Well if you like linux on phone and tinkering you could have had this feature 1.5 years ago (og mce tweak was from August 2022), not sure if covid or war or restructuring or too many levels of approvals delayed a community provided feature that long, hopefully other community-developed-now features (browser upgrade?) won’t linger in limbo for that long

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As you may have realized that the fix that you’re pointing was closed not merged. The issue is fixed elsewhere in the xkeyboard mapping and droid-config.

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When the RC?? My Jolla C awaits it! :smiley:

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I think you will find the answer somewhere in the When is planned 4.4? thread :rofl: :upside_down_face:

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well, i just checked jolla-camera, and it ignored it. it does use the volup button though.
i mapped eventid=201 to cam_full in sf-button-monitor when 10III came out and never looked back.

more importantly, unless i am missing something important, using the physical button cannot affect the camera1 focus model issue. only updated binaries from sony can truly fix it, as the bug affects stock sony android, aosp, and sailfish. (of course, switching to camera2 api everywhere would bypass the issue completely and is the ideal solution, but the bug would still be there if you went looking for it)

i DO use the physical button sometimes (using patched mce or sf-button-monitor), and before i found out about camera2 working, it made focusing very slightly harder because of the slight motion of the camera from pressing the button

So when they tell you, it’s planned for next week, in reality is next month? Jollaaa :joy::joy:

No, it’s just every time someone asks, the actual date shifts by a week (this has been proven by empirical observation people in chats saying so).
And as people can’t shut up about it, these delays accumulate.

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Oh man, didn’t know that. Okay then, won’t talk about it anymore. Take your time Jolla, nobody hurries you :wink:

The update shall come with ~100% probability on Monday, April 29th, if valid during April.
However, not on Friday before the weekend or on next Tuesday, April 30 th, before the 1st May. This is if the old signs are correct. Of course, we can be pleasantly surprised…

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