With the advent of mobile devices having cameras and legendary phones like the Nokia N95 series and the N82(xenon) paving the way having a decent camera is now an important aspect in the mobile world. Last year we saw the rebirth of something new with the Nokia N86 and its low light capabilities and now again with the upcoming N8 with its highly anticipated 12mp and xenon but hold on where does that leave the ultimate pc like mobile device the Nokia N900, after all it sports a 5mp and optics from Carl Zeiss, well maemo geeks have been hard at work and now there is a new
What is FCamera?
FCamera is an open-source camera application for the N900. You can use it as an alternative to the built-in camera application. It provides significantly more manual control over capture parameters, and shoots raw (in the Adobe DNG format). It also includes some nifty features. It has an automatic HDR mode, which has an HDR viewfinder that lets you preview the full range to be captured. It has a “lucky imaging” mode in which it takes a burst of shots and only saves the sharpest. We’ve found that this simple trick lets you handhold exposures of up to half a second.
FCamera really has two purposes. It a useful camera application for photographers. It is also a base camera application that students and hobbyists can modify to experiment with new photographic techniques. Given the second requirement, we’ve tried to be fairly careful about balancing features versus the impact they have on ease-of-understanding of the source. In most cases we’ve favored the simpler source code, which is why you don’t see a lot of custom widgets or fancy icons. That said, it could always be simpler. We welcome any patches to streamline and clarify FCamera’s source.
