[Verizon Samsung Galaxy Note II] jmorton10:
I have been playing with the camera a ton in the last couple days using this app:

http://www.camerafv5.com/

The more I practice with it, the more impressed I am with this device.

If you understand basic photography, FV-5 gives you tons of ways to very quickly/easily make a fast settings change with one fast click to change things like the auto focus point, white balance setting etc to give really outstanding results within the limitations of the actual hardware.

Posters talk about an update like that will magically cure why they can't take a decent picture. No update is going to fix blurry pics when the cause of that is user error (and reading some of these posts it is obvious to me that is the case).

Posters are expecting results that are way beyond the capabilities of a device that is a phone first and also happens to also take snapshots. Expecting it to capture perfectly focused, sharp images of your kid or dog running around the yard is ridiculous. That is the job of a DSLR, even some of the better dedicated DCs will struggle with those kind of shots.

There are two basic settings that apply to any picture taken, F stop (how much light the lens lets in) and shutter speed (how long the shutter stays open while snapping the picture). Both these settings are adjustable on the better quality digital cameras. The faster the shutter speed, the better it is for stopping action. If you shoot at say 1/1000 of a second, you can shoot a clear pic of a race car. On the other hand, 1/15 of a second is so slow that even a slight twitch on the photographers part will result in a blurry image.

With the phone cameras, you don't have the luxury of altering these settings much (if there is any adjustment at all). With the tiny lens of the N2 (or ANY camera phone) you cannot alter the F stop setting at all, it is what's called a fixed aperature and is not adjustable. That only leaves the shutter speed to change to get the correct exposure for any particular shot.

Using Camera FV-5, you can get a small amount of manual control to make that shutter speed faster (better to stop movement) but it doesn't help all that much because if you pick a really fast/short shutter speed the image will usually come out way too dark as it is not letting in enough light to properly expose the image. With a good quality DC, you would open up the F stop more to compensate for this, but you can't do that with the fixed aperature phone camera lens (which is so tiny it doesn't let in much light to begin with)

Camera FV-5 gives you more control than the stock camera app which gives you no control al all, but the tiny lens/sensor etc can only do just so much. I have simplified a lot of this info to make it easier to understand, but the same basic principles apply to any camera all the way back to film cameras.

To take better pics with the N2, try to...

1: hold the camera as still as possible, brace it against something to help with this if possible

2: provide as much light as possible. Either add more ambient light or use the flash (or both)

3: don't expect results that equal a good quality digital camera, the N2 works great for basically posed snapshots etc. If you're trying to shhot your kids Varsity Basketball league or your 2 year old chasing the dog around the back yard get yourself a basic DSLR.