A Tale of Two Phones

"MM54" (mm54mk2) 01/17/2020 at 20:50 • Filed to: Phonelopnik

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In late September, I retired my Galaxy S5 (I keep things a long time) and replaced it with a Pixel 3. Initially all was well, but after some time, I noticed the camera was getting very twitchy and snapped in and out of focus now and then. Over time, this got more frequent, and eventually it lost the ability to focus properly at all (I have complained about this in captions to some of my other posts on here).

Demonstrates the issue pretty well, and frankly makes me want to rub my eyes

Take a look at the picture above. While my kitchen floor may be dated, it is not in fact blurry. If you know much about optics/photography/focus it is clear that this is not how it should be (yes, the lens is clean). I think the whole lens is out of plane with the sensor.

After talking to a friend who bought the same phone about the same time as me, this is not normal at all - neither the twitchiness nor the blurry edges. The next morning I was in contact with Google support, and between showing them that photo and doing a screen-share to show the herky-jerky attempts to focus, they deemed my phone defective (I had tried many things to remedy it prior) .

I will spare the lengthy details and interluding fighting , but a replacement was sent to me under warranty about a week ago. I have finally had time to activate it and set everything up this evening, and so far so good.

Hopefully this one doesn’t suffer the same degeneration - only time will tell.

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As an aside, prior to the Galaxy S5 I had a Motorola Droid Razr, which is a couple years older but I swear took better pictures than the S5 in anything outside of idea conditions. That S5 couldn’t handle anything short of a brightly lit room with a tripod.

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Back to the regular car-related content shortly...

MM54 > MM54 01/17/2020 at 20:53

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I don’t know if I can handle the stress of putting another glass screen protector on. I am no surgeon.

Textured Soy Protein > MM54 01/17/2020 at 21:22

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I had a Droid Razr...in 2011-13 lol.

Dr. Zoidberg - RIP Oppo > MM54 01/17/2020 at 21:26

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Interesting. I’m still rocking a Pixel XL and I too have noticed that is has trouble focusing as time passes. The camera is still leagues better than my S6 (still have for work), but that’s setting the bar real low. I still have my old RAZR in a tote somewhere...

Look at this picture I took at a long red light today. It would absolutely not focus on the TourerV you see centered, after multiple attempts...

facw > MM54 01/17/2020 at 21:34

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Glad you were able to get the defect fixed. Worst camera problems I ever had were with my HTC One (M7), with it’s infamous purple camera (on mine it tended to make things look more black and white except in very low light):

Turning on HDR helped a bunch, but still wasn’t quite right (the water is actually supposed to be that color, it’s dyed with something that turns from blue/ green to red when it needs to be treated):

shop-teacher > MM54 01/17/2020 at 21:39

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Lol! I need to replace mine, and I keep putting it off.

Future Heap Owner > MM54 01/17/2020 at 22:01

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Huh, interesting how in the lower part of your first photo, the left side is in focus, but on the right side it’s blurry, despite both sides being the same distance away from the camera. I thought that “trouble focusing” on a phone camera would mean that it’s all out of focus, or at least everything at the same depth, at least from my rough understanding of how focusing works. Seems like there must’ve been some kind of physical warping or moisture in the works.

MM54 > Dr. Zoidberg - RIP Oppo 01/17/2020 at 22:11

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Late in its life, my Droid Razr got so slow that it only could handle focus or exposure, so I’d either get a way bright or dark in-focus picture, or a well-exposed blurry one

MM54 > Future Heap Owner 01/17/2020 at 22:14

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Exactly! In some pictures it just looked like a very shallow depth of field, but then you’d look and realize that there was blurry and sharp in the same plane - I thought at first it was some weird fake-portrait setting but no amount of software changes/resets would help it.

What’s interesting is that if you tapped to focus in the blurry edge, it would focus there - and blur the middle of the picture. I think the lens was out of parallel with the image sensor.

Future Heap Owner > MM54 01/17/2020 at 22:18

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Oh, the ability to refocus on the blurry part seems to rule out my conjecture. Yours  sounds on the mark