Droid Autofocus Camera Problem Solved

In another of my series of Droid articles I wanted to share a recent discovery and address some rumors of a secret silent Droid update. When I first started to use the Droid 5 MP camera I was a little disappointed in the quality. Thankfully, a bug in the camera was confirmed and Motorola quietly acknowledged a fix was coming in a future update.

This week a number of people noticed a sudden improvement in the Droid autofocus feature. An explanation came in the form of a comment on Engaget from purported Google Engineer Dan Morrill. The autofocus problem was due to timestamp rounding error and was fixed automatically once the date has changed. While I question everything, as a programmer I know anything is possible. I’m told a real service update will be provided before the next date cycle screws up the autofocus again. It will be an official update and not a secret silent one.

I’m a skeptical person so I decided it was important to compare photos I took earlier this month with one take today.

This photo was taken on November 9th. Excuse the kitchen rehab mess

Taken today November 18th. The lighting change is unrelated to the autofocus changes but the detail is pretty obvious. Nice!

Now, just to confirm the theory, I was able to set the date back on my Droid and take the following photo under similar light conditions.

Thanks to Tech Crunch for bringing this information to my attention.

Previous Driod Posts: http://www.droidpatrol.com

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Two "Must Have" Camera Features

Over many years the focus of digital camera improvements have been price, pixels and speed. It’s all the same technology, just bigger, better and cheaper. The popularity of the digital camera has however spawned a welcome industry evolution in solid state memory cards.

I’ve been snapping digital photos for over ten years and finally, I’m starting to see some real innovations.

• Wireless Photo Transfer
  This is a natural progression and Eye-Fi just made it simple and cheap. Instead of each camera company building it into their camera, Eye-Fi has built it into the memory card. Eye-Fi even supports automatic upload to 20 photo sharing sites with more to come. For only $99, if your camera uses SD cards you’ll want to order one of these before supplies run out.

Eye-Fi Wireless SD Card

• Global Positioning Tagging
  It may not be available for all cameras but if Sirf has its way it will be soon. Your camera currently records the date and time you take your photo. How nice would it be to know exactly where you were when the photo was taken? In my opinion this isn’t any kind of brilliant idea, it’s a natural convergence of technology. The GPS network is there and available, why shouldn’t your camera use it.

Navman 750

What would really be really cool is if they could just build GPS functionality into the Eye-Fi card.

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