Taking pictures with N800
 

Does anyone know if there is an app to use the camera to take pictures/video?

Re: Taking pictures with N800
 

Doesn't appear to be yet.

Re: Taking pictures with N800
 

Tabletman: I've hunted on my N800 with no luck. Apparently the only functionality of the camera SO FAR is video calls.

I also tried YouTube's Quick Capture here:
http://www.youtube.com/my_videos_quick_capture

It did not detect the webcam.

Re: Taking pictures with N800
 

Btw, I tried N800 in a store (did not buy YET :)) and pretty much the only thing I hated based on that was that the webcam is on the side of the device, and it feels strange when looking at the pic on the screen and you see sort of a side shot/half face shot of yourself.. would be better if it was in the middle

Re: Taking pictures with N800
 

I agree, viip. I thought mine was accidentally angled too sharply, but then compared it to another one at CES.

Oh... To answer this original thread, I found this at the maemo garage:
https://garage.maemo.org/projects/motiondetector/

So maybe it's possible to just get a camera. But would you WANT that kind of quality image?

Re: Taking pictures with N800
 

Nokia do need to do something about the N800 camera image quality in future firmware updates. The picture quality is absolutely dire, there's way too much noise even in a well lit room (yet more noise in low light) and is it just me or are the colours overly saturated for everyone else too?

Re: Taking pictures with N800
 

Image mine produces appears OK for a 640x480 camera. Am I right on the res? Color accuracy looks good IMO. I guess we can't compare until someone figures out how to capture an image...

Re: Taking pictures with N800
 

I'm not surprised at the low res. Imagine trying to send higher res live video over GPRS...

Re: Taking pictures with N800
 

You could use the camera and then take a screen cap - although the pic would be really bad, at least you'd have an image.

Even though the camera is not up to the standard of even today's worst phones, I would have liked the option at least to take some VGA stills and low res video - especially since there's that potential 8 gig of memory there. (which as a side note, is very useful for quickly dumping N93 videos to on the move)

Re: Taking pictures with N800
 

Are you seriously telling me there's no way to take a picture with the built-in camera? Is this some kind of a joke?

No seriously. You can't be serious, right?

Re: Taking pictures with N800
 

Its linux ... Get over it

Re: Taking pictures with N800
 

Does sound come out of the headphone jack, or is that just ornamental too?

OK, I'm done. But seriously. Seriously!

Re: Taking pictures with N800
 

The main purpose of the camera is to be used as a "webcam" for internet calling and not as a digital camera. If you would like to capture pristine images a good idea would be to spend $150 on a 5.0 megapixel camera.

However, since the N800 is based on a Linux OS it has the potential for the development community to join forces and create a software that will use the camera to capture rudimentary images or videos.

The thread was initiated to find out whether this existed already, but it seems like we are still in the dark on this one.

Re: Taking pictures with N800
 

Re: Taking pictures with N800
 

Compiled camera test app. This will take a snapshot from the camera and store it in your images directory. If anyone likes I may be convinced to expand this with more features ;)

Re: Taking pictures with N800
 

Thanks konfoo. Addt'l features would be great.

Re: Taking pictures with N800
 

I have an interesting app on my Sony Ericsson P910, called PhotoAcute. What the app does, is basically use the P910's VGA camera (like the one on the N800) and quickly take 4 consecutive pictures. It then stitches those pictures together into one higher-resolution one (the maximum resolution is 1280x960).

You need a fairly steady hand and you obviously don't want to use it for action shots, but I've got some decent results with the P910's crummy phonecam.

Anyone is feeling tempted?

Re: Taking pictures with N800
 

Interesting. 4 quick snapshots would definitely be easy to implement. The process that PhotoAcute uses is probably patented though (I notice they allow licensing of the algorithms). I would bet the license is not free either :/

Re: Taking pictures with N800
 

Sorry for being a nub, but how do I install this? I unzipped it and saved the file onto the n800's MMC card, but app manager can't seem to find it.

Re: Taking pictures with N800
 

<SNORTY>Can you add face detection like the one on Fuji, noise reduction, Anti-Shake, Night mode, Panorama mode, auto-stitching? Thanks.</SNORTY>

Re: Taking pictures with N800
 

Alright, nobody else seems to be willing to do it, so here we go.

I compiled the camera test app straightforward from the source at maemo.org and packaged it for the N800 application installer.

http://images.gulbsoft.de/hildon_ui.png

Works for me, but it becomes pretty apparent why Nokia didn't include a snapshot app with the OS in the first place - the indoor / lowlight performance of the camera is abysmal, it's really much better suited for webcam streams than for taking static pictures.

You can download it here, and see a few screenshots at your own risk, bla bla.

http://gulbsoft.de/doku.php/projects/n800

For some reason the picture always comes out rotated 180 degree when you rotate the camera, it seems that whatever auto-flipping support there is in the webcam app doesn't exist or work for the camera testapp.

I'll experiment a bit more with it and see if it's possible to add a few features, such as the auto rotate or at least improve the picture performance somehow (maybe the filters are part of the problem).

regards

-- Georg

Re: Taking pictures with N800
 

Where did I hear that before? :D

Re: Taking pictures with N800
 

Duh-duh-duh-daaaaaahh!
Are you in need of my assistance??

Re: Taking pictures with N800
 

ROFL! Captain Obvious to the rescue.

Re: Taking pictures with N800
 

Auto rotate is very easy to add. http://aksi.mdamt.net/node/174

Does anyone think the original camera demo updates very slowly? I made some sloppy changes to improve this if anyone is interested.

Re: Taking pictures with N800
 

I just wanted to shout out to the people working on this app... you have no idea how useful it will be. :]

Re: Taking pictures with N800
 

I'm also looking forward to the next version of this app. Hopefully with step-by-step installation programs for us new users :D

While the indoor pics may be low quality, I suspect outdoor pics will be fairly decent. For me, this would allow me to take a quick (ok, quicker than running home and getting the real camera) picture with my tablet of things that catch my interest. For example, when I was out shopping this weekend, I stopped by an outlet mall that had a gondola ride in the middle of it. Would have been nice to grab a quick shot to show the family I wasn't just dreaming it up :)

Re: Taking pictures with N800
 

Throw in my $0.02 for an updated camera app. I was messing around with it last night and realized that the low-light performance is so abysmal because the gain is turned up extremely high to get decent motion video (since it's really just a webcam).

If the camera interface allows bringing the gain down, the camera could probably take good indoor/night shots. It would be at the expense of slow shutter speeds just like any other el-cheapo cameraphone but the N800 has a built in tripod! (Bipod?) Add auto/manual exposure settings and 5 and 20 second timers and this little app is well on its way to being useful.

There is a program called CoolCamera (made by AtekSoft) for the HTC Windows Mobile phones. They offer an interpolated mode which takes a burst of 3 (or more, I think) pictures and pieces them together to reduce fringing. I don't know if they use a proprietary algorithm or not but they have some good ideas. I use their program in place of the built-in camera app on my Wizard because it's so slow to load it's almost useless.

Re: Taking pictures with N800
 

Great work!

Of course the camera app managed to crash my N800, but still ;)

We've been thinking of using the camera in the RoadWarrior app for taking photos of receipts when you enter expense reports. For that the picture quality seems to be OK.

Re: Taking pictures with N800
 

I have noticed that the focal range is EXTREMELY close on the camera, it gives great results from about 6" to 4 feet which is unusual but not unexpected since that is technically its working range.

Re: Taking pictures with N800
 

Is any progress being made on a better camera app? I have been messing around with a web based inventory control system. Being able to take a picture of an item, create a new record, and attach that photo to the record all from one device would be a great bonus.

With the N800 cam's ultra-high gain and short focal range, it seems to be ideally suited for this task. I would like the ability to adjust the gain eventually but I'll settle for the camera orientation changing when it rotates from front to back.

Re: Taking pictures with N800
 

Highly suited? Ummm... in my experience the video image quality has been very poor, so I'm not sure how good captured stills will turn out. I have occasionally acheived decent quality but the conditions had to be just right: perfect lighting, no motion, etc.

I hope that this winds up working for people eventually but I sure have my doubts...

Re: Taking pictures with N800
 

Have you tried this Knips camera software, very basic but still good quality VGA-PICTURES! This camera in N800 is not in megapixel class.

Re: Taking pictures with N800
 

ttexrat: it takes good enough pictures for what i would need. I just need a reference
image. I'm going to be inventorying a warehouse of model trains and it would be nice
to know what i'm hunting for on a shelf.

Markku: are you talking about the camera app posted in this thread? I'm using it but it is very rough and doesn't flip the image when the camera points away from the display. i think there is a Garage project (obscura?) with no activity yet but that's it.

Re: Taking pictures with N800
 

There are a few budding projects:
Malomo in the Garage https://garage.maemo.org/projects/malomo/
Knips is at http://www.anderenen.de/anderenende/maemo.html
and Camera Test App is at http://gulbsoft.de/doku.php/projects/n800

I think all of them use the gstreamer infrastructure. So if you wanted to add some rudementary photo taking capability to your inventory app then you should check out the code to these. I believe that they solved the camera flipping by using gconfv4l2src instead of v4l2src. Over time these projects will get better hopefully and maybe incorporate an image smoother like greycstoration http://www.greyc.ensicaen.fr/~dtschump/greycstoration/

Re: Taking pictures with N800
 

Hey thanks for the app. Camera is shyt but at lest i can use it.

Re: Taking pictures with N800
 

mwiktowy; Knips is a pretty decent app! Doesn't have a huge delay like the camera test app did and flips the image when the camera rotates away from the LCD.