[ZenFone 2 Themes and Apps] Me_Zaid:
Yes, after some looong searches, I found out it's the Panasonic MN34130 in charge for the rear sensor. It appears only in a few references on the entire internet, and I hope they are right about it! Sometimes it's hard to deal with the Z00XS' unpopularity. By the way, the MN34130 looks pretty good on paper, right? << https://industrial.panasonic.com/content/data/SC/ds/ds8/c2/FLY000035_EN.pdf >> "Full HD mode (V2/2mix_cH2/2mix Mode)/MIPI 4Lane 10bit format : 60.0 fps"... that would have made this device perfect!

Anyway, back to RAW capture... I found an interesting app called Bacon Camera. It is allegedly able to capture images in a lossless BMP format. (I don't know if it's not an actual JPEG converted to and packed like a BMP. Also, no root is needed.) I used it and was quite impressed by the quality and level of detail present in the pictures. A 13-megapixel image will take (~) 37 megabytes of space; the noise is equally-distributed across the pictures, which is a sign of quality, whereas the noise from the PixelMaster app looks like some discolored and random patches on the image... it gets like that due to its over-processing algorithms I guess. I was able to capture decent amounts of detail with PixelMaster and some manual settings, but the overall look of the images is cartoonish and over-compressed. Its "auto" mode is an unfunny joke sometimes, and those fine-tuning settings (contrast, sharpness, noise reduction, backlight and detail enhancement) don't seem to do anything at all. I photographed the same frame changing those settings and there are no differences - all pictures look the same.

Also, Bacon Camera seems very stable and, unlike other apps, it wasn't crashing when focusing or when trying to shoot a picture while the software was adjusting the focus automatically (Camera MX, for instance, crashes a lot on the ZF Zoom... in the scenarios I mentioned). My guess is that PixelMaster knows best how to handle the Zoom's camera given its physical mechanism and unique commands compiled in the kernel, and that's why other apps screw with it, making PixelMaster the most stable and reliable. Bacon Camera seems great, but it does not have manual controls apart from White Balance and a broad, lackluster Exposure Value control. As some other users mentioned here, manual controls are very important! I was able to shoot the stars on the night sky with my Zenfone Zoom using PixelMaster's manual controls... also, the file size seems to increase with long shutter speeds and a high ISO setting - consistent amounts of noise appear. Without these manual controls, shooting something like the night sky would not be possible.

Honestly, I don't mind if it's called "RAW" or "BMP" as long as they're both lossless, do what they were supposed to do and are able to capture the same amount of detail or accurate colors. (I may mind the lack of metadata/capture parameter-info in the BMP format, but that's OK.) Maybe you can take a look at Bacon Camera's code and see what kind of algorithms it uses, and if those BMPs are indeed lossless and not just fake good-quality JPEGs. Maybe you can mod PixelMaster to be able to do the same thing, or at least replace their JPEG compression algorithms with others that would use the least amount of compression and render the best-quality JPEGs. (PixelMaster is great on the manual department... well, apart from the awful quality and those tuning settings that seem useless, things that are enough to keep us away from using it.) Another disadvantage of Bacon Camera would be its waiting time. When you take a picture, it takes a long time to process the BMP, which means that taking many pictures in a short amount of time would not be possible. It says "processing YUV" and then "processing lossless", and lasts for a few seconds.

I also tried the modded Google Camera HDR+ (It crashed a lot!), but no setting combination was able to output any RAW file for me. Do I talk too much? Of course I do, haha, but I do it in hope that any of this info will be helpful to this thread.

[Also, I can attach some samples if needed, but you'd better try it for yourself; no root is needed for Bacon Camera.]