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Comment by jasonkester | Hacker News Reader

I really just want Android to stop messing with the camera and let it take pictures. It's getting harder to take a photo without it stripping all the texture from people's faces and blurring out the background, or worse.

Here's a video of me moving around on a static background, taken from a tripod. Evidently bending the fabric of the universe as I move:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSlgOwm_eXU

That's the stock camera app on my brand new Pixel 3a. Since this was taken, I've been experimenting with every setting possible to try to convince it that I don't want to "pop" or be "motion stabilized" but no, there's nothing that will stop it doing this.

I'm going to have to return the phone.

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What you are asking is certainly reasonable but may be technically impossible to achieve. It is probably not android but the camera hardware itself that does a large part of this processing.

The reason that today's cameras on phones look so much better than those of 10 years ago (especially for static photos) is due to advanced methods of image processing. The information available to the image is limited by the diffraction of the lens and by the thermal noise of the captor, and these are two physical constraints that can not be loosened. Thus, any increase of resolution is due to heavy image processing, that denoises and de-blurs the images so that they look as if they were better than they can actually be acquired by this captor. This is an ill posed problem since denoising and deblurring essentially act in opposite directions! The solution to this problem inevitably goes through projecting the low amount of information that you have into an image model of higher resolution. This necessarily leads to artifacts in some cases.

For the case of video, the motion artifacts that you observe in the rocks are often due to video compression and the correction of camera shake. The first is done in hardware so there's not much that you can do about it. The correction of camera shake may have a software part that you may be able to disable. Have you tried different camera apps?

Yeah wow, that's pretty bad. It looks like it thinks you are the thing that should be stationary and it's stabilizing the rocks with you as the reference point. Nice climbing by the way!

In the same vein I wish that Google would just let me view all the photos I had taken on my phone.

I almost exclusively use the "Camera" Album in the Photos app on my Pixel 2, but some update seemed to irreversibly back up and delete most (but not all?) of my photos. Now when trying to view all these backed up photos online (as there doesn't seem to be a way to get them back onto my phone) the feed is polluted with other random images from Whatsapp, etc. with no way to filter any of them out. And now I can't easily show anyone anything I took on my phone from a few months ago!

It's annoying because I quite like the Pixel 2 camera, but definitely agree with you that it should have more "dumb" options.

My guess would be that this is a video compression artifact, not a deliberate image enhancement effect.

Though that doesn't help when you can't adjust the quality.

The odd thing is that a given piece of unrelated rock will be in perfect focus, then suddenly go blurry when I get near it (but not so near as to cast a shadow).

If it were video compression, you'd expect it would try to not alter pixels that didn't change from frame to frame. But it clearly updates large swathes of them.

Also, changing the compression mode in the camera from h.264/AVC to H/265.HEVC doesn't fix it.

As far as I know, video compression works on areas, not just pixels. To me, it looks like it's trying to update areas of the photo by moving areas of pixels, instead of just updating them individually. This is accidentally getting more than just the part that's moving, and making things nearby seem to move as well.

For instance, in the video provided in another comment, when the climber swings his legs up a bit, there's a portion of the wall that stretches behind him, before eventually un-stretching back into place. It flows behind the moving limbs. I suspect that if good video were taken of the scene, the leg would also be somewhat distorted while moving, but we can't really tell because it's supposed to be changing, unlike the rocks.

The 3a supports three video capture modes: UHD 4K (30 fps), HD 1080p, and HD 720p.

It would be useful to know which mode was used and if this occurs in more than one of them.

My armchair guess is that the 3a isn't powerful enough to capture 4K without creating compression artifacts.

But if 1080p is "good enough" I would say that's going to be the 3a's story - just don't use the most taxing settings.

I only tested in 1080p. Most tests were at 30fps but i did a couple at 60fps to verify that that didn’t fix it.

720 would be unacceptable for a camera in 2019, so I didn’t try.

I’ve already initiated the return with google and printed the shipping label. Guess I’m on the market for a new phone if anybody has a suggestion.

Have you tried using a different camera app? e.g. Open Camera

I would recommend the same, although I can imagine it might not properly support the latest Pixel 3A yet.

This is really odd. I am going to run some tests on my own Pixel 3a and see if I can replicate it. Seems stupid.

I spent the morning with the Open Camera app, standing in front of the stone wall of my garage and waving my arm slowly, trying to find a setting that didn't cause this effect.

No luck thus far. I can make it slightly less noticeable, or glaringly obvious. But I can't get rid of it.

Please let me know if you can (or better still can't) replicate it. I'm returning the phone tomorrow, but if it's just my device I'd consider buying another one to replace it.

Just purchased a Samsung S10 and trying to switch to Android. The last time I tried taking some picture it interrupted me with some EULA for some additional service I never wanted. UX have gone down the drain on all mobile platforms.

That's so weird. Do you know if this is unique to the 3a?

I posted this to /r/GooglePixel when I first noticed it, and at least one other person confirmed it was happening with their phone too.

I haven't found anything about anybody having the same issue on a regular Pixel 3.

That is very annoying to watch. What is it trying accomplish?

I watched your video but still couldn't see any particular issue like distortions or apparent problems.

Try full screen on a desktop. Watch the texture on the rock near the left hand and hip.

It’s not really noticeable on a phone unless you zoom in, but impossible to miss on a big screen.

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