Is pixel the only phone that provides HDR through the main camera pipeline without needing an extension or requiring apps to build their own custom HDR
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Possible Samsung has decent processing for the normal camera mode in other apps. You could try comparing HDR and Camera modes in low light. It should be easy to see if HDR is actually doing better by reducing noise. Normal mode could just be doing it less aggressively though.
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As far as I know though, Pixels were the only devices providing great image quality via the normal camera API without needing to implement your own processing. I'm just not sure if Samsung has also addressed this now. It may not make sense to do what Pixels in 2021/2022 though.
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Pixel 4a and later (it's strangely not available on the Pixel 4 and Pixel 4 XL) use the high quality preview toggle (disabled by default) to provide HDRnet for preview. CameraX uses this automatically.
We haven't confirmed if video HDRnet is provided to other apps for Pixel 6.
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I actually noticed the Pixel 4a/5/5a had worse image quality in apps than Pixel 4/4XL, so I'm not sure that change was for the best
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Only difference is that the preview on Pixel 4a, 4a (5G), 5, 6, 6 Pro and 6a uses HDRnet. It doesn't impact the captured images. Problem is that at least on 4a and 5th gen devices (4a (5G), 5, 5a), the preview misleads you into thinking there will be less noise than you'll get.
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HDRnet is a neural net trained on captured HDR+ images that's able to peek back at previous frames and emulate the look of HDR+. It does improve quality for real because it adds information from previous frames, but not as much as HDR+. Issue is they trained it on Google Camera.
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And the HDR+ they are currently providing to other apps, at least on 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th gen is not as good as the HDR+ in Google Camera. Note we have not tested how it compares on Pixel 6. It's possible the gap is smaller now since they'd have had to redo it for Pixel 6.
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Also worth noting: Google Camera is entirely based on the normal Camera2 API. Other apps can use the same APIs. They use Camera2 scene modes for Portrait, Night, etc. but they do all the actual processing themselves including for HDR+ with Google Camera.
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Production releases with Google Camera are given direct access to the Qualcomm DSP and 4th gen Pixel Neural Core via a custom SELinux domain. Google Camera works fine without the custom domain but the processing takes a bit longer since it loses that hardware acceleration.
On GrapheneOS, we remove the custom domain since it's barely noticeable on modern devices and we don't want Google apps having privileged access. Google Camera still works fine for us. We could allow it to use that but removing is part of the whole sandboxed Google Play approach.
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Pixel 6 got rid of the custom domain for Google Camera. They moved all of that stuff into the OS via a vendor APEX with the camera HAL implementation. It's really inexplicable that they don't support all the Camera2 and CameraX extensions. They have 99% of the work done already.
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