The Nexus 5 camera isn’t bad, but it’s not great. We won’t lie about that. Scott Plowman of Ausdroid brings to light how the Nexus 5 camera can be improved however with a mod. When Google’s Senior VP of Engineering, Vic Gundotra, said back in February that the company was “committed to making Nexus phones insanely great cameras” we believed him. Unfortunately the Nexus 5 camera is it’s not “insanely great.” We’ve compared the Nexus 5 camera to the Nexus 4 and to the Galaxy Note 3 cameras, just to see how it stacks up. If you’re someone who would like to see your Nexus 5 camera get better, you’re in luck. This is a Nexus device, right? Devs are hard at work picking the device apart and putting it back together again.
One developer on XDA, Jishnu Sur, has been working on Android phone cameras for awhile. The Nexus 5 is one of those cameras that Sur wants to improve. Before you get started with this mod, you’ll need to have an unlocked bootloader, a rooted device, and a custom recovery installed on your Nexus 5. If you haven’t rooted our N5 yet, we’ve got you covered. Once you’ve taken care of those steps, all you have to do is flash a .zip file. This mod attempts to update quite a few things:
- Increase JPEG quality to 100%
- Set JPEG compression to nil
- Increase Picture Color tune to warmer side
- Improve color reproduction
- Audio bitrate set to maximum
- Faster focusing camera
- Edge enhancement turned on
- And much more….
The XDA Forums thread goes into a lot more detail about what the modification does. The results seem to be improving with each new mod released by the dev. The camera will focus much faster and pictures turn out better. Some users are seeing much better photos; others seem to only notice slight improvements.
Installing the mod is simple. Just download the mod version that you want to try from this XDA Forums thread. Reboot into your custom recovery. You’ll want to perform a back up before you install the .zip file, just in case it doesn’t work with your phone. Some users have experienced boot loops. Once you’ve completed backing up your phone, wipe cache and dalvik cache, and then flash the .zip. Keep in mind that this modification is still in beta. Be careful and have fun!