[Desire Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] nawoa:
This thread's piqued my curiosity a bit, I'm going to try to do a semi-scientific study to determine what the best settings are for the camera.

I can't say exactly how you'll have to configure your new N1 since I'm using the Sense camera app, but you can probably still have an improvement by trying to modify settings in a similar way.

This is very preliminary and I don't have daylight to work with, I'll get into it more tomorrow, but so far:

Contrast is best at its default setting, 0. I'd prefer a -0.5 but no such option exists.

Saturation should be reduced to -1, this will help lessen the strength of noise and also gives somewhat more realistic color.

Sharpness should be reduced to -1, this again will help reduce noise and eliminates the majority of the sharpening artifacts. Going down to -2 helps a bit more but the loss of detail probably isn't worth it.

Brightness should be left at 0, it operates in mysterious ways and doesn't seem to be very helpful regardless of how it's set.

The ideal video capture resolution is 640x480. 320x240 doesn't appear to bring a framerate improvement so there's not really much sense unless you're limited by storage. All capture sizes besides 320x240 and 640x480 operate by simply cropping the image and offer no positive effects that I can see. 720p may add a superficial amount of detail but at the cost of an unsteady framerate and much greater encoding/decoding load (1280x720 vs 640x480, or 921,600 pixels per frame vs 307,200).

Similarly, taking widescreen stills simply crops the top and bottom and results in no quality difference to the part of the full frame that's actually recorded. You're probably best off recording in the sensor's native 4:3 aspect ratio and then cropping them to your taste on your home computer.

The ideal video capture codec is MPEG4 - H.264 offers a nice reduction in filesize but uses too low of a bitrate, resulting in worse quality during fast movement. It is also more work to encode and decode, hurting your battery life.

Obviously don't use zoom for any reason since it's just cropping and resizing with speed as the only consideration. You'll get much better results doing the same thing on your home computer.

Due to the low sensor quality, there's not a whole lot of difference between 5 and 3 megapixel shots, but there's no harm in going with 5mp. The biggest difference is the filesize. Taking a picture of the same subject, my 5mp shots ranged from 2.96mb to 2.38mb, while the 3mp ones were 1.22mb to 0.76mb.

I'd like to revise my earlier statement that the processor isn't capable of encoding 720p30 in realtime. It's now my opinion that the problem is just the camera firmware trying to make sense of the idea that you're asking it to pull usable pixel data for a 1280x720 frame, 30 times a second, from such a tiny sensor. To compensate for the lack of light information, it's forced to reduce the framerate or else the image will turn into a mess of noise. It's probably being a bit too conservative, but not by a lot. The fault lies with the sensor, not the CPU... I think.

Finally, *something* I did seemed to significantly reduce the framerate, or rather, the quality of recording high-motion video. This might be something peculiar to the rom I'm running, or it could be completely in my head, but I think I changed something when I was messing with the various settings and it had a noticeable negative effect.

It's late here now so I'll pick up in the morning but my current wild guesses are:

-Capturing full-frame is more difficult than capturing cropped widescreen, or vice-versa?

-Face detection processing adds too much latency to the recording?

-Flicker reduction should be taken off auto for best performance?

-Custom filtering settings (brightness/sharpness, etc) slow recording down?

-How the camera was focused reduced/increased the encoding difficulty?

-Sharpness settings increased/decreased the amount of frame data needing to be encoded?

-...Or I screwed something up in SetCPU? No... I don't... think so... but it's pretty late. Hmm...

I'll pick up tomorrow. Someone's probably already figured out the perfect settings but I'm pro at being redundant.