Essential Phone Camera Software Update Promises To Deliver Faster Performance

The $700 Essential Phone from Android creator Andy Rubin has been criticized for having mediocre camera performance. Essential Products has announced that it’s currently rolling out an over-the-air (OTA) software update to improve camera performance on the Essential Phone.

Essential says that the software update will speed up the camera performance on the Essential Phone by 40 percent. The company says that capture speed will be less than a second faster than before. This also includes the speed of capturing photos even in low light.

Speaking of low light, the camera update on the Essential Phone also improves brightness when capturing photos. Low light photography on the device is one of its weakest aspects. It was previously reported that photos taken in low light with the Essential Phone have a lot of digital noise and are also not exposed properly.

In addition to adding improvements to the camera, Essential is also introducing some improvements to its 360-degree camera accessory. With this software update, users will now be able to capture spatial sound when shooting 360-degree videos. This provides “3D audio” to the footage. Spatial sound is supported by Facebook and YouTube, as pointed out by Android Central.

Users will also be able to use the Essential Phone’s volume up/down buttons as the shutter button for the 360-degree camera. The software update also adds a new countdown timer when users are shooting 360-degree videos.

For those who didn’t get the 360 camera accessory, it’s available to purchase from Essential for $199. For users who haven’t even bought the Essential Phone yet, they could simply purchase the bundle that includes the phone and the camera accessory for an additional $50.

“Over the last couple of weeks, our camera team has been listening to your feedback and has worked hard to improve latency, reliability and performance of the camera on Essential Phone,” Essential’s director of software engineering Michael Kolb said in his blog post. “Since computational photography is used to post-process and fuse images from both the color and monochrome sensors to create new functionality, we’ve been able to improve the overall image quality through software updates.”

The Essential Phone is equipped with dual 13-megapixel cameras with one color sensor and one monochrome B&W image sensor. Images taken by both cameras are fused together to create a single image. This is supposed to deliver superior image quality, but reviews for the phone’s camera performance weren’t great when the phone finally launched.

Images taken in low lighting conditions are usually poor or are inconsistent, according to Gizmodo. Some photos would look fine, but later the Essential Phone’s camera would produce images that are blurrier and grainier. Launching the camera app is also slow, which means that users might miss the moment they wanted to capture in the first place.

Essential already pushed out a software update for the phone’s camera back in August, but the improvements weren’t enough to fix the poor quality in capturing low light photos. As 9to5Google pointed out in its review, “They aren’t the worst low-light pictures I’ve seen on a phone, but for the Essential’s price point, it should be much better.”

Hopefully, this new software update to the Essential Phone’s camera will deliver significant improvements. Users can get the software update by downloading it from the Google Play Store.