Camera Lag?

[bioart#WP]

Hi,

I've played around with some tweaks, and read around, but can't find a satisfying answer to this question:

When I'm taking a picture on my sprint touch pro, I press the button and it focuses, but the picture takes about 3 seconds to actually take...

For anyone with kids, pets or taking pictures of anything alive, this is usually a problem. No one stays put for that long. I usually end up taking pictures that are blurry (in in glorious 3.2MP, which makes it really obvious .

IS there a work around to this? I've tried changing the settings on the camera to touch vs. touch/press etc, but it still takes forever... is it just me?

I just want to press a button and take a picture immediately... is that too much to ask?

 

[George Ponder]

I just want to press a button and take a picture immediately... is that too much to ask?

For the camera on your Touch Pro, yes.

The lag time is due to several issues. The lag while focusing is for the camera to determine the settings. The lag while you press the shutter is for the electronic shutter to function and the processor to capture the image. The lag after you press the shutter is the time it takes for the processor to write the image to the storage card or main memory.

While you do have more control over the camera's settings with the Touch Pro, the design and functionality are conducive to lag time. The Samsung Pixon may change all this but for now I don't think you can get away from the lag.

I may be mistaken but I don't think the camera on the Touch Pro has a memory buffer. On dedicated digital cameras there is on-board memory that acts as a buffer between the processor and storage memory. It speeds up the process by providing a temporary storage location for the image while it waits to be written to storage so the processor can move on to the next picture.

Part of your blurriness is due to slow shutter speeds due to lighting and movement of the camera. Remember the camera on your Touch Pro is more of a convenience than anything else. These cameras can be very useful at times but personally, I don't think they are designed or intended to take the place of a dedicated camera.

Here's some light reading on the subject if you're interested.

 

[bioart#WP]

Thanks for the explanation. I'm coming from a Treo 755p, and my experience with that phone was that pictures were taken a lot faster than the touch pro. Maybe it's a palm vs. windows thing, but it is significantly slower.

I agree that I'm not expecting great pics, but one of the things that these cameras are really useful for is to take pictures of "a moment" (whenever that happens)... with such a lag, that moment is usually gone by the time the picture is actually recorded.

The touch pro has this really strange behaviour in that it freezes the image once it finds focus, but then it takes the picture afterwards... I'd be happy with the frozen picture that is displayed even if it is of lower quality, at least it is the picture I wanted to take and not the one of the kids looking the other way

 

[George Ponder]

I think one of the key differences between the 755p and the Touch Pro is that the 755p has a fixed focus camera.

That is the 755p's camera focus is pre-set for distances of around 3 feet to infinity. The Touch Pro seems to use digital focusing (as opposed to mechanical focusing) that's not pre-set. The 755p was quicker because it didn't have to bother with focusing.

 

[alex.shimp]

George I am not sure if you found this on another fourm, however if you go into the camera on your TP, click on settings, then brightness take it down to -2.0 and you will get rid of the lag and the preview on the screen works better and is almost live. Hope this helps