[EVO 4G Android Development] NxNW:
Ok it's been at least eight hours since anyone complained about the camera. Let's stir the pot again.

On my HW 0004 Evo I am running RLS1 non-godmode with a carousel rosie, no themes, no kernels, no mods of any kind except the carousel.

There is a camera app that came with RLS1. In my "manage applications" control panel (and in titanium) it says it is "version 3.00.000.042190.531"

When I launch the app and touch [menu]..Effect I see these choices:

No effect

Panorama

HDR

Distortion

Vignette

Depth of Field

Dots

Vintage

Vintage warm

Vintage cold

Grayscale

Sepia

Negative

Solarize

Posterize

Aqua

16 to choose from. Great. Except for certain ones it's not clear that they result in any meaningful change to the image.

'Panorama' works. Fine.

And 'HDR' may do *something* [although it's now not immediately clear to me if it isn't just applying different rules for adjusting the exposure (instead of actually taking three or more bracketed exposures, extracting the highlight and shadow detail, and using tone-mapping to render a final result, as one might expect a true "HDR" feature to do)].

But 'Distortion' is a great example of an "effect" that seems to change the interface of the camera app without actually affecting the resulting image. When I touch 'Distortion' a toast pops up saying "Drag the bar to adjust the effect". If you swipe down all the menu-ing stuff that is in the way, you will in fact see a new slider bar present in the UI. Ok. Except that sliding it left and right doesn't do anything to the image.

Also there is a new 1-cm translucent gray circle superimposed over the image, and you can touch it and the little corner-bracket-things show up and a sound happens, but this seems to be the same stuff that happens when you touch a part of the image to set focus and exposure anyway, little circle or no little circle. The circle shows *up* when you select 'distortion', but it doesn't seem to have anything to *do* with 'distortion'. The *slider*, which is clearly intended to help adjust the level of distortion, doesn't do anything at all.

Let's be real clear here, the intended effect should be very noticeable. When you touch the magic wand icon, you get a scrollable bar along the top of the image showing a sample of all the available effects, including distortion. My guess is, if the effect were working correctly, I would see more or less of this "smearing" effect coming and going *in real time* as I adjusted the slider left and right. Instead I don't see any effect, regardless of position.

One last detailed use case scenario before I give the summary at bottom. For the 'Vignette' effect, once again, you get a toast and a slider appears. And this time there is a new translucent gray circular *ring* superimposed over the image as well, and sliding the slider actually seems to change the radius of the ring. Neat. You can make it big, small, whatever, all day long. But at no time does a vignette effect appear!

Bonus: when selecting the 'Depth of Field' effect you get to see *both* the 1 cm circle *and* the adjustable ring, but once again, manipulating the slider has no effect on the image.

Ok, enough of the blow-by-blow. Using the sample images exposed in the magic wand scroll bar as a guide to what I *should* be seeing, here is my report card on which features work and which ones don't :

Panorama	works

HDR	not sure

Distortion	does nothing (placebo slider added to UI, but has no effect)

Vignette	does nothing (placebo slider added to UI, but has no effect)

Depth of Field	does nothing (placebo slider added to UI, but has no effect)

Dots	does nothing (placebo slider added to UI, but has no effect)

Vintage	does nothing

Vintage warm	does nothing

Vintage cold	does nothing

Grayscale	works

Sepia	does something, but clearly broken*

Negative	works

Solarize	works

Posterize	works

Aqua	works

* 'Sepia' simply gives the exact same effect as 'Grayscale', does not add sepia tone at all

[edit - I wish the xda interface allowed some kind of tabular format so I could make this more readable..]