topic camera app - where is the JPEG quality settings?? in Z Series

camera app - where is the JPEG quality settings??

McVitas — Sun, 03 May 2015 16:21:08 GMT

Hello, this seems pretty weird to me and I guess there must some hidden agendas behind this Why can't we change the compression level of our photos taken by Xperia phones using the default camera app? I don't know since when this option disappeared, or if it ever was in Xperias, but on all my other phones or digital cameras I used I could set this.

The problem is simple. Xperia Z3 Compact camera saves all photos with 97% JPEG quality! This is ridiculously high and results in crazy big JPEG files (around 3MB) even with only 8Mpix (super auto mode)! With my Xiaomi Mi2s I could take 12Mpix photos which looked way better, but thanks to the quality settings the files were almost half of the size compared to what Xperia makes! Let's not lie to ourselves - Xperia photos are not so great compared to other phones. And especially for photos taken in interior or with low light conditions (they are never great on the phones in general...) it is totally useless to save them with 97% JPEG! The information stored in the file is just high definition noise and not much more :-] I have had a lot of digital cameras and various phones and I usually convert almost all of my photos (unless they are some exceptionally sharp and good focused sceneries) to around 70% JPEG quality. The results are that the converted images are almost indistinguishable from the originals even when viewed at 100% zoom, but the FILE SIZE can be around 25% of the original! For the typical low light pub/bar photos it can be even less! Of course that smaller file sizes allow much easier photo sharing, faster copying onto flash drives and less worrying about cloud storage space...

I believe that Sony probably has some agreements with SD card makers or Google to make people fill their cards and cloud drives quicker thus making them order bigger storage sooner by not allowing them to set the compression level of the photos :-] I hope this will one day be fixed, but in the meantime I will probably use Camera FV-5 which has this basic functionality preserved and allows me to change this basic settings.

Re: camera app - where is the JPEG quality settings??

MyAliasIsGary — Sun, 03 May 2015 20:15:11 GMT

@McVitas wrote:
Hello, this seems pretty weird to me and I guess there must some hidden agendas behind this Why can't we change the compression level of our photos taken by Xperia phones using the default camera app? I don't know since when this option disappeared, or if it ever was in Xperias, but on all my other phones or digital cameras I used I could set this.
The problem is simple. Xperia Z3 Compact camera saves all photos with 97% JPEG quality! This is ridiculously high and results in crazy big JPEG files (around 3MB) even with only 8Mpix (super auto mode)! With my Xiaomi Mi2s I could take 12Mpix photos which looked way better, but thanks to the quality settings the files were almost half of the size compared to what Xperia makes! Let's not lie to ourselves - Xperia photos are not so great compared to other phones. And especially for photos taken in interior or with low light conditions (they are never great on the phones in general...) it is totally useless to save them with 97% JPEG! The information stored in the file is just high definition noise and not much more :-] I have had a lot of digital cameras and various phones and I usually convert almost all of my photos (unless they are some exceptionally sharp and good focused sceneries) to around 70% JPEG quality. The results are that the converted images are almost indistinguishable from the originals even when viewed at 100% zoom, but the FILE SIZE can be around 25% of the original! For the typical low light pub/bar photos it can be even less! Of course that smaller file sizes allow much easier photo sharing, faster copying onto flash drives and less worrying about cloud storage space...
I believe that Sony probably has some agreements with SD card makers or Google to make people fill their cards and cloud drives quicker thus making them order bigger storage sooner by not allowing them to set the compression level of the photos :-] I hope this will one day be fixed, but in the meantime I will probably use Camera FV-5 which has this basic functionality preserved and allows me to change this basic settings.

use open camera and you can pick the compression level of your .jpg

I've personally found the focusing on open camera is better too.

The author is in the process of implimenting the lollipop camera API, so you'll be able to write to the SDcard AND also save to RAW.

Regards,

Gary

Re: camera app - where is the JPEG quality settings??

_alexdon_ — Sun, 03 May 2015 20:41:41 GMT

The discussion about camera is here:

/t5/Software-Updates/Camera2-API/td-p/974742