[bbstorm4me]

I am having lots of issues with the indoor pictures with flash being grainy.
Real grainy and red blotches. Outdoor low light ones are an issue too.

I tried setting "auto stabilization" OFF as I heard that actually helps with picture quality but they are still really poor.

The camera is OK outdoors on a bright sunny day but anything else is not so good. I would say the worse digital camera I have owned.


I am on v5.0.0.419 but all my OS versions seemed to have this problem.

Basically anything with low light gets red blotches on it and grainy wheather indoors or out.

I am using these settings:
Auto flash,
Autofocus Normal,
Image stab 0ff,
White Balance Auto,
picture size Medium,
Picture Quality Superfine,
Color effect Normal,
Geotagging Disabled,
store on Media card

What are better settings to get better quality?


Here are some samples random shots of what I am talking about below taken in my garage where I notice more issues.

The first 4 shots are with stabilization OFF and you can see in them some are better than others.
and the 2nd 4 are with stabilization ON.
The other pics are with stabilizaion ON and the outdoor ones are ON and low light from a rainy/coudy day.

The 6th one is especially bad IMG00166-20100308-1021.jpg and many turn out that way. Often on the camera it is not that noticible and then when you get it home and transfer to PC it is down right ugly.

All sugestions welcome. I would like to have some decent pictures. These seem inconsistent.

How long do you let the focus and flash stuff settle before taking the picture?
Some of these are point and shoot, some are wait for the white square to go green and some are after going green and pre-flash light going out.

Thanks

[bbstorm4me]

On the pictures with the green car they were all taken with the garage door closed and just an overhead single incondesent light and the flash. It is amazing the variances in quality. They are all bad but it is very inconsistent. I guess based on when I press the key for the shot.

[bbstorm4me]

I also just tried setting to
Picture Size Large
And then
White Balance = Auto, Night, Incandescent and also Fluorescent.

They chaged the shades a bit and Night made it darker but they all wre still grainy and red blotches.

I also troed small picture size as well.

If I take a closeup and set to closup focus it seems to do OK with the flash. There are a couple shots of that.

So it is primarily a picture in low light that is 8 to 12 feet away that does the worse, like the car pics.


Any ideas on how to fix that?
I guess I just need a lot more light.

[Snarfler]

I know my pix are grainy in low light, don't know if there's a setting to improve that, I just figured it was a characteristic of the sensor array in the camera

[Makisupa]

Those pictures seem about par for the course; they are definitely consistent with what mine look like. The noise you are seeing is most likely the result of a high ISO needed to compensate for the weak flash. I don't think you can really improve on the quality of the pictures; it is a phone after all..

[l.a.rossmann]

This is a camera built into a phone.

What next - the D/A converters for audio output on the storm are worse than my modded MCM 50-7774 running off a linear power supply??

Welcome to the world of convergence devices, where you can do anything you can think of, with half ast **** poor quality.

If you want good pictures, buy a camera. Phones are toys as cameras. My 4 year old $70 canon powershot destroys any cellphone camera I've ever used. It's cute to take pictures for facebook and crap, but if you want good pictures, buy a real camera.

[bbstorm4me]

OK I was hoping for better. My old Samsung SCH-a990 takes way better pictures inside and out. Like at least 2 times better. But then it is a 3.2 megapixel camera, wait this Storm has a 3.2 megapixel. I guess they are not all made the same. The BB Storm was like 3 years newer and far inferior in picture taking.

[rratheesh_83]

I cant think of any BB that I used that had a decent camera. Its a business phone and so you really can't complain about the camera!

[ekim2010]

OK I was hoping for better. My old Samsung SCH-a990 takes way better pictures inside and out. Like at least 2 times better. But then it is a 3.2 megapixel camera, wait this Storm has a 3.2 megapixel. I guess they are not all made the same. The BB Storm was like 3 years newer and far inferior in picture taking.

This is definitely true, some times its not about the resolution but also the quality of the parts inside that makes a good cam.

[B.on.the.run]

I noticed the quality of photos got worse after the upgrade to v5 .328 and had some / limited success in improving the grainy pictures with the Image Stabilization OFF.

[stunna54960]

Subscribed

[cynsorthis]

My camera sometimes comes up grainy. But since you're talking about taking pictures (not meaning to hijack your thread), how much does your camera zoom in? I can only zoom in to 2.0x. I could have sworn when I first got it, I could zoom in further than that. How about you?

[bbstorm4me]

Only 2X on the zoom.

[bbstorm4me]

I cant think of any BB that I used that had a decent camera. Its a business phone and so you really can't complain about the camera!

Yeah but I did not buy it for business. I do use it to get my email from work but through a sync server not the official exchange way of doing it so I get a 15 minute delay normally.

I bought it for the following (with my rating of it):
touch screen B - works well but a few dead spots in corner or edge
camera D - Grainy low quality photos
video camera C - No zoom, Did not work until August 2009 release
web access C - Slow, slow and not very good
email C - Works most of the time but wants password verified 20 times in the last day! RIM servers!
music B - This is the one thing I am pleased with. The speaker is great and Slacker is good but font is too small to read on Slacker
phone calls C - Takes 2 or 3 answers to connect and poor mic


When my contract is up for renewal in a month or 2 I think I will toss the blackberry storm and get a real smartphone like the Nexus One. It is leaps ahead of any blackberry or other phone out there. Verizon is suppose to be getting them in late March so goes the rumor.

[l.a.rossmann]

OK I was hoping for better. My old Samsung SCH-a990 takes way better pictures inside and out. Like at least 2 times better. But then it is a 3.2 megapixel camera, wait this Storm has a 3.2 megapixel. I guess they are not all made the same. The BB Storm was like 3 years newer and far inferior in picture taking.

Expecting 2 cameras to look similar because the megapixel spec is the same is like expecting 2 speakers to sound the same because their frequency response specification on the brochure is identical.

It doesn't work that way.