Everybody has a reason to buy a smartphone, some want to make calls, to play games, to watch movies, or to be active on social media all the time, hey! I’m not going to judge you, but here is the thing, in 2020 you at least expect your phone to have decent cameras but doesn’t happen all the time or maybe you don’t want to spend a ton of money on a smartphone. A good camera is not all about specifications, there are smartphones with 108mp camera sensors, but they are not the best. Software optimisation is one of the key elements to a good camera and google knows it better than anyone. Even when there are smartphones with up to 5 cameras launched this year, Google launched pixel 4a with just one camera and its still one of the best camera smartphones in its price segment. This happens because of the software optimisation it does with its smartphones.
GCAM is the optimised camera application ported from google
pixel devices to be able to run on other android phones. If you do not have the
latest flagships of 2020 chances are a ported camera app from google pixel will
easily outperform your stock camera.
Back in the day, it was hard to get gcam for all the phones, it was available for an only specific set of devices due to lack of developers.
Now you can easily find a gcam mod for almost every smartphone in the market
unless you are an iPhone user and in that case go buy an android.
Gcam comes with a ton of features like 360-degree image capture
(photosphere), time-lapse with speed up to 120x, astrophotography mode(night
sight) and a lot more.
If you are someone who doesn’t like this trend of
beautifying the selfies that companies are opting for this year, you’re going
to love the gcam. Its portrait mode comes with an amazing Bokeh (blur effect) which you
can customize later, after clicking the picture.
CAMERA
The images from gcam are more natural and colours just look perfect while the stock camera app generally tries to make the colours look flat. Here is the comparison.
 |
| GCam (LEFT) Stock Camera (RIGHT) |
You can clearly see that the sky looks better in the gcam
version and gcam photo has a lot of details.
Ok here is the big one.
 |
| GCam(LEFT) Stock Camera (RIGHT) |
Now in this picture, there is a lot of sunlight and look at how well
gcam captures the depth in the image. The gcam photo looks more natural here
also the stock camera is flattening the image.
 |
| GCam (LEFT) Stock Camera (RIGHT) |
Look how flat the colours look in the stock image and the gcam photo just looks more natural and has more clarity
NIGHT SIGHT
Now let’s check out my favourite feature of the gcam, the
night sight mode. It captures multiple images with different exposure settings
and combines all the images, the results are amazing.
the above image you see is taken at night in New Delhi. If
you don’t know about new Delhi let me tell you it’s tough to spot the
stars here and yet gcam was able to capture a lot of them also you take an
image of a tree at night in pitch darkness It will come out to be a black
silhouette, but here gcam did a great job in capturing the leaves. It takes a couple of seconds than usual to take an image using night sight, but the results
are totally worth it.
GOOGLE PLAYGROUND
Now, this is awesome,
Previously, these features were available only on pixel devices but now you can have these features on almost any device, but your device should be google AR supported. You can check this on google for your device. Also, other than avengers there are a lot more AR characters to choose from.
OTHER FEATURES
The list doesn’t end here there are a lot more features like photosphere, time-lapse, panorama, lens blur etc. It has RAW capture as well which saves a lot of information about the image and gives you more control of the image while editing. It also enables you to capture an image with HDR+ control. It has a lot of subtle elements like it will give you a dirty lens warning and tell you to lift your phone for better angles of selfie also you can customise volume key for timed shutter and camera button for instant capture, for some smartphones it also supports 4k 60fps video recording. For videos, it has HEVC format which enables you to save video efficiently.
HERE IS
THE CATCH
Well, Gcam comes with some really amazing features but not
all of them is available for all the smartphones, for example, slow motion video
capture doesn’t seem to work properly on my pocophone f1, so you really need
to check which feature is working on your device.
Also, your phone needs to support something called
camera2api (I will talk about it later). You can check if your phone supports
it by downloading an application called Camera 2api probe from play
store.
WHAT IS
CAMERA2API?
For this let’s understand what an API is Application Programming
Interface is an interface which enables one application to interact with
another application and share information with each other. Before camera2api,
camera app functionality was very limited, you could only take pictures and
preview them, when google introduced camera 2 API in lollipop version of
android it enabled camera application to do a lot more like control shutter
speed, RAW capture, Focus, HDR control which was previously available only in
professional cameras. Since then camera 2 API has been the standard API in
android but google limits the control of the features for different phones and
that’s why every feature is not available for every smartphone. Also, its
depends on the fact that how much your processor can handle, for example, slow-motion video capture is something that involves a lot of processing power
that’s why it's not available on low and mid-range smartphones.
TL; DR
GCAM is google camera ported from pixel devices for other
android phones. It has some amazing features like astrophotography mode, night
sight, 360-degree hdri capture, google playground for AR stickers and interactive
characters. It's incredible you should give it a try.
DOWNLOADS
If you want to download gcam for your smartphone you can
type your phone name followed by “gcam” in google search and will probably find
something for yourself. Also, I will leave a download link of GCAM for some
smartphones below.
2 Comments
✌🏻Perfectly explained
ReplyDeletethanks man. I appreciate it.
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