SLR style control over N900 camera
 

I am well aware the N900 could easily replace people's point and shoots during normal daily use(as evident here), but it's rare that I find a point and shoot with enough manual controls to make me happy. In this case, it's a moderately nice camera on an open source platform so something could easily(I hope) be whipped up.

What I wonder is if anyone else out there is interested in an app like this and if anyone would be willing to code one. I don't have the coding skills to pull it off or I would in a heartbeat ;) However I am a bit of a graphic designer and could easily build the interface images.

Anyone up for this before I submit it to brainstorm?

Re: SLR style control over N900 camera
 

I'm for it... what I'd like to get out of it are RAWs and of course as much fiddling as it can be done :)

It won't replace my Oly E-520 but I want somethign I can have always with me to take pics. So far haven't seen a P&S I like that would offer RAWs.

Note I also do not code

Re: SLR style control over N900 camera
 

Was wondering why do P&S camera don't allow RAW files?
Is it because of the processing power? Or the file size (RAW files are much bigger than jpeg's)?

Luckily, N900 doesn't lack in any of them. It has both the muscle and the space. So, I hope it is possible to shoot RAW with N900.

Can someone provide some insight into this.

Re: SLR style control over N900 camera
 

Since RAWs are just the RAW take from the sensor and some extra metadata usually it would be the reverse... a JPEG requires more processing to generate. Though a RAW requires a higher datarate to store an image.

I think it's mostly that most people don't care enough for RAWs. I tend to shot in both RAW+JPEG(at max quality) if I like the JPEG I'll keep it if not I'll try playing with the RAW to see if I can get anything out of it.

Re: SLR style control over N900 camera
 

Thanks for the support, of course if you use the Canon Hackers Development Kit(CHDK), any Canon point and shoot will shoot in 3 different formats of RAW ;)

Point and shoots don't provide RAW files because very simply put, the vast majority of end users would have no idea what to do with them. They require advanced editing software to convert them or even view them in some cases, they take forever to write to the memory card, and they take up a lot of space. For the person who does *not* care about editing, raws are very nearly pointless.

Quite right, RAW image files are after one curve and one levels have been applied, typically JPEGs have had 2 sets applied and therefore become more faulty to edit. RAWs also have non lossy or no compression at all. Making them the premier archival format.

On occasion I shoot professionally using Pentax DSLRs and I always, always, ALWAYS, shoot in RAW and convert to JPEG or TIFF later. I have probably close to 100gbs of RAW images saved on my external for safe keeping.

Now to make a long story short, with the right codec, which should easily be obtained for something like Adobe's DNG format, it should be a simple matter of saving the RAW image info to it.

Re: SLR style control over N900 camera
 

I wouldn't want DNG(never cared much for adobe). But something like tiff or the like or any other lossless format will be good enough for me. And of course more or less unprocessed ;)

Re: SLR style control over N900 camera
 

TIFF wouldn't be a bad idea, but Adobe has promised to forever support the DNG format(thusly why they call it the Digital Negative format) And has thusly become a popular format supported widely by both cameras and photo editing software.

Also TIFF is completely uncompressed, DNG allows for lossless compression meaning a much smaller file with the same image editing options.

Personally I'm looking less for RAW features though and more for things like manual aperture control, manual shutter speed control, manual ISO control, manual white balance.. You get the idea, also it would be cool to apply custom made curves from photoshop in real time so you can see what the picture will look like before you take them. And apply the curve as the 2nd curve used for JPEG conversion from RAW. That'd be cool. Though we'll see what's actually in demand if any of it. :)

Re: SLR style control over N900 camera
 

Well it can probably support both so not an issue really. I would expect it to support things outside of specific vendor domains.

But yeah all the other stuff would be nice to have as well. I completly forget about that since I rarely fiddle with those. Well other than shutter and aperture.

Re: SLR style control over N900 camera
 

While I agree RAW would be great, I don't think we'll get manual control. I believe all camera phones have fixed apertures, focal lengths, and shutter speeds, generally around 4.7mm and f2.8. The only variable are the glass elements movement for the Auto Focus and ISO for different lighting conditions.

Though...I would love to see maybe a scroll bar, or a ring on the side of the screen to control focus distance.

Re: SLR style control over N900 camera
 

Shows what I know about camera phones :rolleyes:

Well at least curves and RAW would be do-able. I love the idea of a slider for manual focus, if we could do that in live video too, that would be really handy. With an aperture of 2.8 we could get some neat effects with a manual focus slider in vids. And of course the live curves levels applied in real time to the vid as well. :D

Re: SLR style control over N900 camera
 

Curves and levels, I couldn't live without my levels. At least slip us a 3 color histogram in the gallery.

Re: SLR style control over N900 camera
 

what the ****?!?!? do you have any idea what size is aperture 1/2.8 @5mm?!?!? it is about Ø1,8mm. And what about 1/2.8 @ 300mm? it is about Ø107mm.

the physical size of aperture is straightly relative to amount of blur.

and lets take "normal" 50mm. what aperture is similar to the n900's camera module: 50/x = Ø1,8mm -> x = 28. so go ahead and try with dslr @50mm aperture about 1/28 and see how cool the blur effect is.... :eek:

http://www.dofmaster.com/dofjs.html

absolutely no to the raws and stuff. theres no use for it. buy dslr if you want it. M, Av & Tv (from canon) at maximum.

Re: SLR style control over N900 camera
 

I think more manual control over the camera would be nice.

I don't want RAW, but I want to be able to select HQ (low/no compression) or Normal JPG.

And flash control. There seems to be only two settings for flash -- "glaring white-out" or "off". There's gotta be some other settings, no?

The camera has "Tessar 2.8/5.2" on it, what does that all mean?

EDIT: f2.8 at 5.2mm?

Re: SLR style control over N900 camera
 

The camera also has a "rolling shutter", causing some very interesting effects to occur:

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2598/...7b8493be_m.jpg

Re: SLR style control over N900 camera
 

Obviously if I want blur I should use my DSLR and my f1.2 50mm lens, *but* blur(field of confusion) is also dependent on how close your focus point is to the lens it's self. So if shooting something right up next to the lens in the lens' minimum focus distance one should still be able to create a nice blur effect. And slowly changing the focus to something more in the distance during live video could look quite nice.

I also agree with the RAW capture, seems useless on a 5mp camera phone. Still if you can control the curves and levels when writing it to JPEG it could be very useful.

I highly doubt there are any more settings for the flash, I believe the LEDs are either on or off, however you could change how long they stay on for during longer flash based exposures.. Oh that reminds me.. Slow sync/Rear curtain sync would be nice to have on a point and shoot. :)

And yes f2.8 at 5.2mm is what ossipena was saying. Also thanks for the very cool picture, I was unaware of the rolling shutter effect and had to wiki it:o, very cool for a couple artistic ideas.:D

Re: SLR style control over N900 camera
 

Well, you can get RAW files with point and shoot digital compact cameras if you have one of Canon stylish little Ixus cameras. I can on mine, by using alternative firmware:

http://chdk.wikia.com/wiki/CHDK

Re: SLR style control over N900 camera
 

I am aware of that. As said I haven't found an acceptable device yet. I'm not a Canikon user. But having RAW and RAW+JPEG with the N900(for those that want it - not always etc...) is imho a very good thing. It means one can go and fixup some of the more annoying issues one can get.

I know it's not the best thing with the lens and so on. But it could work well.

And to the person that is completly opposed to this. I take it you're completly opposed to everything that doesn't fit your personal opinion.

Re: SLR style control over N900 camera
 

A small technical tidbit - on low(er)-end cameras you don't have RAW because people don't need it, but because it would be an engineering obstacle. Remember, processing an X megapixel image on a generic CPU takes a LOT of time, that's why they all use dedicated hardware for that. So, in order to fit stuff into buffers, get better image rate (=throughput) the RAW image never really reaches the firmware/'main' CPU parts. DSLRs and high-end PS-es of course go the extra mile and actually have strong enough hardware to deal with RAW through the whole image processing chain, but that's a different story. As for the particular hardware in the N900, I have no idea just how close to actual pixels can we (end users/independent developers) get - especially considering some of the elements involved in image processing (both HW&SW) are a patent/closed source minefield.

Re: SLR style control over N900 camera
 

no reason to get hopes up, the effect is very minimal no matter what if you are comparing it to tvs focus effects. and the camera module is pretty sharp from minimal focusing distance to infinity when focused to minimal distance...

Re: SLR style control over N900 camera
 

I believe any powershot series camera from Canon can shoot RAW as they can be loaded with CHDK to run.

Re: SLR style control over N900 camera
 

BTW anybody found a way to painlessly remove the stylish chrome imitating plastic part that only helps reflecting the flash into the sensor ? (the cam covering slider is not helping either, but at least it serves a purpose :) )

Re: SLR style control over N900 camera
 

the n900 will never have "slr style control" for one big reason- it's not an slr. i hear this often, and it appears you may be associating the typically manual control of a camera, with it being slr. slr stands for single-lens-reflex, meaning only that when you look through the camera viewfinder, the picture/light you see is coming through the lens... the n900, or any mobile phone for that matter is not an slr, and never will be. if you want manual control of the shutter speed, aperature, exposure, that is a different issue completely...

slrs are typically mechanical cameras. mechanical shutters, mechanical lens/glass, and for 35mm slr cameras, mechanical film advance... i associate the quick-reponsivness, and large body with an slr... both characteristics of an slr (and hopefully responsiveness of the n900 too)

hope that helps some

Re: SLR style control over N900 camera
 

I completely agree with what you said.
Having said that the OP is just asking for SLR STYLED control and NOT SLR quality pics. With control, he probably meant the menu navigation and stuff.

Re: SLR style control over N900 camera
 

Well that picture is from the famous Dr. Ari Jaaksi, but from the comments on Flickr (click the picture in my post to go to the photo page), people weren't exactly sure why that effect was happening.

Black Sharpie marker?

Re: SLR style control over N900 camera
 

As I specifically said I only want manual control, so far as I've found out, most of which is impossible. Yes I realize SLR stands for the *build* of the camera, just as Micro Four Thirds is the sensor type since they can't really say Single Lens Reflex minus the reflex (lol), but I used SLR since it's something a great many people are used to, and understand the type of controls I was looking for.(Guess I should have said 'Advanced Camera Control for N900 instead :rolleyes: )

In any case I don't want higher quality pics, or larger more complex files(though some do), just more control then we already have. A geek's control, if you will.

Apply curves and levels in real time, adjust focus manually (to what minimal effect it may have) if it was possible I really wanted control of the aperture and shutter speed, though it seems like that one is just a pipe dream till someone like Sammy joins forces with Nokia for a Maemo powered *phonecamera.* (Which would be epic)

Anyways, before I get to far ahead of myself, perhaps what we should detail ITT is the abilities we *could* add to the N900's camera through an app.

Raw functionality *is* doable. Yes 600mhz is definitely enough to save a Raw image from the camera sensor assuming we actually have access to the raw image data that the camera takes.

Curves and Levels run along the same lines, definitely do able IF we have access to the raw data.

Manual focus is also doable(though possible less useful then initially thought), and I should hope much easier to impliment then the first 3.

Focus tracking is along the same lines, doable but possibly pointless.

ISO control should also be easy. (even though I'd pretty much have it locked on the lowest it can go ;) )

Custom Timer is doable easily.

Remote/Remote Timer through bluetooth with devices like the WiiMote. (OR *maybe* an IR remote though I'm uncertain if the IR sensor can receive since the manual says it's not IrDA compatible also with the IR port on the top and not the back it would be difficult if you're taking a pic of yourself)

Panorama merging could also be doable though one of the very nice little open source linux programs out there.(read: Hugin) Of course the processing power required to run this might bog down the whole device for a matter of hours depending on how many images were used.

Custom White Balance should also be doable preferably with access to the RAW camera data.

AE-L(Auto Exposure Lock) Locks the exposure at the area you're pointing the camera in so you can easily auto expose for your subject then recompose the shot with the proper exposure.

EV+/- (Exposure Variation) Deffinately doable even if only a cheap trick would still help give a little more control over how the picture turns out.

Exposure Bracketing should also be quite easy to do along the same lines as EV+/-

Setting shutter speeds for LONG exposures may or may not be possible since the N900 uses a rolling shutter and I'm not sure how that would effect longer exposures or if they're even possible.

Flash syncing like Slow Sync, Trailing Curtain Sync, Strobe Sync, etc, should be easy if long exposures are possible since you only have a time delay/repeat on the flash of a long shutter.

Automatic pictures taken at regular intervals for showing the growth of a flower blossom over a day or the traffic patterns outside your office, etc. Should be the easiest of the bunch to code in.

The ability to add custom meta data on to pictures while their taken. Should be easy to implement.

And last but not least shooting speeds. Likely slow as many of the current market point and shoot's have about 1.5/second.(Given those are 12mp images from a bigger sensor and have a dedicated camera processor that I doubt could be clocked at as much as 600mhz...) Of course as resolution is reduced higher speeds should be possible.

Anyone else care to add anything? OR prove something on this list can't work?

Re: SLR style control over N900 camera
 

Megahertzes mean nothing in this context. A specialized DSP/FPGA found in a midrange DSLR can easily outperform even a multi-gigahertz multi-core desktop processor at specific tasks. There was actually some talk about this at the summit - it was told the current time required to capture an image is a balance - if you would wait 10 minutes for an image, you would a lot better looking images. If you want quicker capture, quality will suffer.

Re: SLR style control over N900 camera
 

I think this thread should be merged with
http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=33016
(Maemo and Computational Photography)
and
http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=33007
(HDR Pictures with the N900)

Re: SLR style control over N900 camera
 

true but the OMAP3430 is, so maybe there is some piece of software missing instead of hardware. this needs further investigation and maybe nokia can help on that with hardware infos

http://focus.ti.com/general/docs/wtb...emplateId=6123

Re: SLR style control over N900 camera
 

I found that out when researching the OMAP4440's a couple weeks ago. I wondered if that might be the case, but if you notice, the FM radio is provided just not active with any software and in the manual it says so. It actually invites you to write your own code for it, but in the case of the IR port is simply says it's not IrDA compatible. Leading me to believe the port can only send IR signal not receive OR the hardware is not fast enough to receive an IrDA signal.

Re: SLR style control over N900 camera
 

Exposure Bracketing is the thing that i most want so we can make some lovely HDR shots

Re: SLR style control over N900 camera
 

The camera sub system for the OMAP 3 processors does allow for raw and a few other things.

The link below is to TI's omap35x camera subsystem manual. I would assume that the two camera subsystems would be very similar if not the same.
http://focus.ti.com/lit/ug/sprufa2b/sprufa2b.pdf

This manual suggests the following features are in hardware:
- custom white balance
- Colour filter
- noise reduction
- Programmable color correction (RGB to RGB)
- Programmable gamma correction: 1024 entries for each color
- Programmable color conversion (RGB to YCbCr 4:4:4)
-Color subsampling (YCbCr 4:4:4 to YCbCr 4:2:2)
- Luminance enhancement (non-linear)
- Resizing

These features should be accessible from camera drivers as I would assume they are the same drivers that are used for the OMAP35x processors.

Other features could be implemented in software.

Re: SLR style control over N900 camera
 

Wow thanks so much! That includes a surprisingly handy and comprehensive list of everything the camera module can do and how to use it. Also reading it's abilities reminds me that I should add live histograms to the list of features for this.

Anyone care to confirm that this is the same set of drivers (or similiar to) for the OMAP34x processors?

If they are that confirms a lot of things that an advanced camera app could do on here. :D

Re: SLR style control over N900 camera
 

it appears the same driver is used for all of the omap 3 series.
The link below mentions N900 support.
http://gitorious.org/omap3camera/pages/Home
The link below is to the git repo for the omap3 camera drivers which also contains the n900 driver(RX-51) branch.
http://gitorious.org/omap3camera

I am not sure about the specific camera sensor for the n900 so I am not sure which modes it operates in(the camera sub system module manual shows different modes for sensors). The mode shouldn't effect what you are looking at doing and the drivers probably answer the question of what mode it operates in. I have seen some camera sensor modules that actually put out JPEG by default and need to be reconfigured to output RAW.

Depending on how the drivers are configured(unfortunately i do not have time to have a look and find out atm) changing settings may be as easy as unloading the driver and reloading the driver with parameters. Now the only problem would be how the camera is switch and changes with the driver parameters would effect the other camera(the same input on the ISP is used for both cameras).

Re: SLR style control over N900 camera
 

Thanks again for taking the time to find that out. Perhaps when the camera app is closed, the old drivers get reloaded since it's unlikely you'd be using both cameras at the same time. Still that's a bridge we'll have to cross once we get the actual program running.

Now to find someone who actually knows how to code this thing. :)

Re: SLR style control over N900 camera
 

You would be using the v4l(video for linux) framework for the application.
There should be a fair few resources out there and a number of applications that you could probably use as a base.

Re: SLR style control over N900 camera
 

There is a camera example for maemo that comes with the maemo sdk image called example_camera.c that is an example on how to use the camera and take images use v4l framework. It also has a bit of information on how everything works.

From my brief look it does not offer any of the functionality that the manual for the ISP suggests is possible. That means that the features and settings will need to be changed via driver parameters.

The example_camera.c could be a good base for taking pictures and the unloading and reloading of drivers with parameters could occur when the program is loaded.

Re: SLR style control over N900 camera
 

Annoyingish.
I had a couple of apps in mind that would use both at once.
Using the front camera to shoot video, while the back camera shoots stills, with the front camera acting as a 'optical mouse' - to give relative position for the stills.

mplayer indeed won't play from both cameras, saying busy.

Re: SLR style control over N900 camera
 

I opened a new thread on vdieo4linux drivers with an objective to gain access to more control over users camera.

http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php...736#post430736

Any help will be gratefully appreciated.

Klen

Re: SLR style control over N900 camera
 

N900 camera is capable to produce RAW output. However, v4l2camsrc does not give it by default to an application, you need to do tricks outlined in camerabin example in gstreamer.

Another problem is that V4L2 is not very useful for controlling still photography. It lacks certain things and giving large set of control points (80+ ioctls with many sub-controls), all asking for reorganization... For example, it is not possible to get per-frame information about parameters this frame was taken with, even though main camera on N900 is capable to return this information as part of its data flow.

Maker Note contains some information about the parameters but it is encrypted and encoded and currently algorithm for decoding it is not public.

It would be relatively simple (example code is there, in camerabin examples in gstreamer) to write a gstreamer plugin that saves RAW frame data in parallel to shooting and processing JPEG image. It will work with Nokia-provided camera as well, user would need to modify some settings in the configuration file. Perhaps Christmas time would give me some space to write up a summary of what is published on maemo.gitorious.org already.

Re: SLR style control over N900 camera
 

what camera has a rolling shutter? the n900-camera???
if so, how do you "use" it on purpose?

judging by the comments and tags this was shot with a n900...