Camera - terrible

[maffmace]

My wife has recently got an Xperia U, she uses it as her main device for photos & videos having come from Xperia Pro, Xperia Mini Pro and X10 Mini Pro before that.

The camera, in sunlight or indoors with my expensive & bright video light (trying to say it's not the lighting conditions here) is grainy (photo and video), for still shots won't focus more than 50% of the time, in video you can see focus adjusting constantly making it unwatchable and in videos a lot of the time the video and audio is out of sync.

Having got it right in her past 3 phones, how is it so bad in this current phone?

firmware is up to date (using SUS) so that's not the problem. Having looked around on the web this seems to be a very common problem on the XPERIA [instert letter here] phones and from what I can see Sony are just fobbing users off rather than explaining the problem and rectifying it.

Any advise?

Even my Galaxy Nexus takes better photos and videos, that's how bad it is.

[dajcina]

is your wifes U on GB or ICS? i was very satisfied with xperia U camera on 2.3.7. android, even my canon G7 starts to collect dust... after update to 4.0, camera became unusable. hard to focus anything, needs few seconds to shoot and pictures are much darker and grainy. roll back on 2.3.7 factory rom and I'm happy now again

shame on sony for waiting ICS so long and then releasing that crap!

btw, video on xperia U wasn't nice story ever, drop frames, skiping focus, strange on picture artefacts... even on sunny outdors

sorry for bad english

[maffmace]

It's up to date so on ICS, we updated it because it was doing the same on GB and we'd read online that an update would cure it.

[Rado77]

Set it to 2Mpix

[Johan]

I'm sorry to hear. If you haven't tried to reinstall the software using SUS I suggest you do, to troubleshoot this problem.

If you still find the camera quality bad I suggest that you have your phone examined at an repair center to deterime the quality.

http://www.sonymobile.com/global-en/support/contact-us/contact-info/

[Rado77]

I think that here is nothing to repair. I'm amateur photographer and I compared 5Mpx photos with 2Mpx photos by using stativ, different light conditions, good light conditions in park.... The result is that 5Mpx photos are less sharpen than 2Mpx photos. I don't know why - maybe ICS (and GB too before) uses SW calculations for making 5Mpx photos. But each photo is much better on 2Mpx. I can shoot something in both modes and attach it here...I'll do it today...

[lalapeta_mohan]

After ICS update i dont find any problems evrything working powerfull than GB.

Two main things which is common for all

1. Camera quality decreased ( in low light its too bad )

2. overall  touch is not that smooth as in GB( if u want to ZOOM a photo in album its not that smooth)

If these 2 can repair then XPU with ICS is unbeatable.

[Rado77]

Here are differences between 5 and 2 MPx:

As we can see, 2MPx photos are much better. They are sharper and with better contrast. The same situation was in GB. Camera settings were standard (default).

[ghencea-RO]

You can't do anything about it. That's the camera quality and you can find other threads about this issue. The videos were also bad but it was improved by GB 184 fw update. But the photos are low quality especially on flash or in low light level. I put some samples also to compare with Samsung Ace. You can see the quality also on gsmarena.com.

Here is a fresh example of Sony camera. Picture taken with auto settings in a cloudy day at noon. The flash didn't go. Can't read the sign and foggy look. Thank you Sony.