I guess the librem 5 will not be the right phone for you / provide what you want. I understand your demands on the camera as high-end / cutting edge technology. This is will be in most cases quiet expensive. It has to be developed in-house or closely with the camera module companies to achieve . Both i think is out of scope for purism. No way they do cutting edge camera tech in-house. That would leave to work closely with a to camera module producer. But i’m pretty shure all of them are keeping their new tech closed source and to the top paying companies like apple, samsung, google.
Also i think it’s not in line with purism goal as i understand it. Their goal is to produce a phone that is as open and privacy protecting as possible, which is expensive. So every part which doesn’t help this goal has to be optimised to a best value for the money, while still make the phone competitive. Which means satisfying “normal” every day needs. Not high end use cases like i would describe yours.
But let’s hope i’m worng an pursim just source a new unknown super camera module with open source drivers and someone form the community throws in a top notch camera app with AI.
@dlkr if it’s just for snapping easy eye-catchy photos on the phone just use Apple or Google or whatever phone has those “desirable” features you were talking about without using it for anything else and use your librem 5 as a daily driver (when you feel up for it).
or if it’s for high-quality RAW and post-procesing then use a high-end DSLR with your laptop/workstation.
remember how the iphone was when it first released in 2007 - and it was after all Apple. it had experience and a user base allready and still can you compare that to what Purism a young SPC today achieves ? i think you’re hoping for to much for a phone that didn’t even release yet.
There might be scope for us customers to experiment with that at our own risk, IF the camera is a module with a standard form factor and disconnectable interface AND there are better modules available with the same form factor and interface. (Not something I’ll be doing. It just crossed my mind.) I’m sure the Librem 5 will be easier to disassemble and modify than your typical iPhone.
These are all great ideas. However, imho, I hope Librem engineers don’t spend much time on modular parts. There is to much other work that needs to be done. Modular parts could be implemented in version 2.
The camera will not be a user-interchangeable module in the sense of Project Ara or other modular phone concepts, but it will most likely be an internal module of some description, because that’s the least time consuming and least difficult way to provide a camera.
Is there already some more information about the camera (specifications)?
Currently, the Librem5 hardware specification page still states for the front camera and back camera: TBD.
I think most camera modules allow to get the uncompressed sensor output so it should be possible to save all images as RAW files, shouldn’t it? This would improve the image quality a lot if we would be able to post process the images by one self as one can do it with DSLRs images!
I just hope it will support PNG. Last smartphone i had has a 20MP camera but the photos were JPEG and i couldn’t change it. Photos were 2160p but ugly anyway. Cameras with high pixel counts that does only compressed photos make no sense.
Sounds like you took pictures inside a chat app that only used about 5 of the 20MP and then compressed it to death to save bandwidth. Under normal circumstances (quality 80% or more) you should be unable to tell it is JPG.
Well, there are plenty possibilities why the pictures were bad, including too much compression. But if used properly, JPG is not a problem.
I expect that on the Librem you’ll sooner or later be able to save RAW or JPG with high quality. We all want good quality, so it will happen
RAW is usually for higher gamut capturing sensors (10bit color depth and up) but uncompressed tiff would work nicely for the L5. i assume the L5 will capture internally at most 8-bit color.
I was wondering if the camera flash can be used with the switch turned off, I use to use the smartphone as a torch a lot really and that will be an little issue for me if it’s not possible.
That’s an interesting question. I would like to use it as a torch too. It doesn’t make much sense for the flash to be switched off with the camera since it’s not a sensor but I guess it depends if the camera and flash are linked in some way and if they can be powered separately. It would be inconvenient if the kill switch has to be on but it wouldn’t bother me personally that much.
