Cameras and Open Source Smartphones: It’s Complicated

Author here. While the essay comes from the side of smartphones, it&#x27;s not really limited to them. As I mention, even some laptops use setups that require complex infrastructure to support. libcamera itself is also used in the Raspberry Pi, and the interfaces in the Linux kernel are used by the Axiom camera, which is truly a photo camera.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.apertus.org&#x2F;axiom" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.apertus.org&#x2F;axiom</a><p>The problem of camera diversity is not limited to open source either, because a similar infrastructure to handle all the different cases must be replicated by closed drivers as well. I don&#x27;t know about Macs, but the Surface laptop is a Windows beast.

One of the things that I came across when I was looking for an RPi camera replacement was Samsung&#x27;s &quot;ISOCELL Plug and Play&quot; - A turn-key solution with prepackaged lens, EIS, image pretuning, and VCX* objective camera evaluation. The image looked good enough compared to cutting edge at the time, and I imagined it would be perfect for small startups and companies who wanted a quick time to market.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;semiconductor.samsung.com&#x2F;image-sensor&#x2F;isocell-plug-and-play&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;semiconductor.samsung.com&#x2F;image-sensor&#x2F;isocell-plug-...</a> EIS video: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;images.samsung.com&#x2F;is&#x2F;content&#x2F;samsung&#x2F;p5&#x2F;semiconductor&#x2F;products&#x2F;image-sensor&#x2F;isocell-plug-and-play&#x2F;4-kf-steady-video-pc-mp4-02.mp4" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;images.samsung.com&#x2F;is&#x2F;content&#x2F;samsung&#x2F;p5&#x2F;semiconduct...</a><p>Unfortunately I never got one and it now looks to be unavailable. I don&#x27;t know if Samsung would have had interest in Open Source efforts to support the modules.<p>VCX objective camera evaluation links: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dhd.com.tw&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2020&#x2F;11&#x2F;VCX_Whitepaper_V2020.01.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dhd.com.tw&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2020&#x2F;11&#x2F;VCX_Whitep...</a> <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vcx-forum.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vcx-forum.org&#x2F;</a>

It’s complicated is an understatement ;)<p>I assume most people have no visibility of the effort of <i>hundreds</i> of engineers who work on behalf of the big smartphone companies tuning for what happens in the image pipeline between camera&#x2F;raw Bayer data to what your app receives.<p>There is a reason the quality of pictures in phones has got so good - lots of tuning, quite a bit of magic, as well as software and hardware co-optimization.

Free Software is so cool - I love how the solutions to tough problems can be shared so that everyone benefits from the work. It&#x27;s a long journey, but I&#x27;m glad that there are people doing the hard work. This is the reason that I&#x27;m happy to support Purism!

I&#x27;ve been looking at cheap, low-end movie cameras recently like the Blackmagic Pockets, Sigma FP etc. I&#x27;m sure this is a naive question but I&#x27;ve been wondering why I can&#x27;t buy a good sensor module, attach it to a Raspberry Pi or similar, put it in a nice case with an SSD and a lens mount etc and call it a movie camera. I guess that&#x27;s kind of what Apertus are trying to do with the Axiom, but they still don&#x27;t seem to have shipped anything real after quite a lot of years.<p>The low end of professional-ish cameras is great in lots of ways, but they all have annoying trade-offs. To be fair I&#x27;m sure any janky POS I built would too.

&gt; And once we get the functionality we need working, it will be available to others using libcamera: applications and other cameras will have them out of the box.<p>Reason enough to support purism.

In the meantime is there a Librem phone without a camera? Because the camera is like the lowest priority thing for me on a smartphone. I could easily live without it.

Would it make sense to optionally also have a service that exposes these cameras through v4l2, so legacy applications can still make use of them, without patching them to make use of libcamera?<p>edit:<p>This would also resolve the dilemma of having complex camera drivers either in kernel or in a library. It could be in userspace while the kernel provides a small kernel module to make it work (like v4l2-loopback, or not unlike FUSE for filesystems).

Is <i>complicated</i> the right word here? It seems to me that the specs&#x2F;datasheets might perhaps be somewhat difficult to follow, but otherwise it sounds like basic plumbing.

Interesting hope this makes it to the other competitor phone hehe.

I didn&#x27;t know cameras were an issue. OpenCamera just works for me with no issues.