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.



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

Where did I hear that before?

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

ROFL! Captain Obvious to the rescue.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.