Constructive criticism of Nokia Camera

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Criticism for criticism's sake is rarely helpful - but constructive criticism is always useful and I hope that Nokia's development team for 'Nokia Camera' is taking note of the nine point complaints list in this article, quoted below. Yes, one of the points has since been refuted, but some of the others are corkers. If I were the programmer, I'd be adding these to my 'to do' list...

Here are a few from the list that caught my eye:

Nokia Camera offers significantly more control than any other camera UI we’ve used on a mobile phone (808 and its Creative Mode included) in an intuitive Sliding Control UI. We love being able to have manual control of Shutter Speed, ISO and even Focus on a mobile phone camera. A great Slider UI to control these aspects, paired with options like Bracketing, Timer, custom Framing Grids and Windows Phone 8′s concept of Lenses make it the best Mobile Camera money can buy. However, it isn’t perfect. Here are some issues we have with it. Note that none of these make it unusable in any way, but are ways it could be even better:

Windows Phone Notifications Are Jarring
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You are crouched in place waiting for that perfect shot. You see what you need to shoot and are adjusting the settings accordingly. Suddenly people on a WhatsApp group of yours are in a particularly chatty mood, and you get a notification for each and every message they write, forcing you to keep having to swipe away the banners from the top of the screen. This happens even when you Mute the WhatsApp Group. We realize this is a Windows Phone/WhatsApp issue, but feel Banner Notifications should be disabled by default in the Nokia Camera App.

I fully agree. Taking photos is one of those times when you really don't need your concentration disturbed, not to mention your viewfinder taken over. Notifications should be suppressed until the camera is closed. OK, this might also need system support for a way to view notifications after the fact. [cough. Windows Phone Blue? cough]

Multiple Reframes From Single Shot Not Possible – You take a shot, then later decide one aspect of the image is most interesting and reframe to show only that part of the image. Once this is done, you can’t reframe to show another aspect of the image, *and* have the first reframed image, at the same time. You have to choose one. With the 808, we remember Nokia talking about ‘Many Images From One Shot’. This doesn’t seem to have carried on to the 1020.

I can see what Nokia are thinking here, in that the 5MP shot is only ever the current reframed 'viewport' into the underlying full resolution image - but a 'Save as' option on the menu would be nice, in order to be able to explicitly save different reframes without relying on SkyDrive upload to save them in the meantime.

Shot To Shot Time Is Slow – When in the zone, you want to as short a shot to shot time as possible. On the 1020, the time taken between each shot can be jarring. If you are in the 5MP + 38MP Mode, shot to shot time gets even slower than in only the 5MP mode. While we get that there is a *lot* going on under the hood, the average user may find this quite disappointing, especially when compared to the camera experience in some of the competition.

Although a very valid complaint, I don't think the oversampling can go any faster - new hardware will be needed. A Snapdragon 800-based Lumia 1020 successor should see these shot to shot times come down to a second or so.

Swipe To Close Sliders Can Accidentally Exit App – Swiping the Camera icon left opens up the Slider UI of concentric circles. Swiping it right closes these sliders. However, many times while sliding the camera icon to the right to close the sliders, we ended up touching the Home button of Windows Phone and exiting the camera app. By doing so, we lose the settings we just set to the different parameters like ISO, WB, etc when we again enter the Camera App. You can just be more careful, or use the Back button instead of sliding the icon left, so this is a minor niggle.

Absolutely. Both in Nokia Camera and in games, it would be incredibly helpful to have accidental brushes of the Start control icon ignored. Maybe the OS could look for a deliberate press of more than a fraction of a second while in 'fragile' apps?

Unleash The Phones concludes:

Most of these problems can easily be fixed via software updates to Nokia Camera and we hope Nokia does. With DNG support coming to the 1020 with the Nokia Black update, things can only get better from here for avid users of Nokia Camera.

Indeed. I'd add to the overall wishlist some way of adjusting the saturation and sharpness being applied in the image processing, since not everyone likes the current set-up - a way of producing more neutral, natural images would be excellent.

Source / Credit: Unleash The Phones