Essential Phone owners might be receiving the update they have been waiting for.
With the phone’s latest firmware update, NMI81C, and camera app update, available from the Google Play Store, Essential believes it has improved the Essential Phone’s image quality and camera performance. In addition, the company says the two updates boost camera capture speed in a variety of scenarios, though particularly in low light conditions. Low light photos will look better because of improved brightness, says the company. Elsewhere, the update includes miscellaneous bug fixes and reliability improvements.
“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. 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,” says Essential’s Michael Kolb.
The company says more updates are on their way, including improvements related to the camera’s high dynamic range (HDR) photography mode, as well as 360 live streaming functionality. Additionally, a pro mode and a portrait mode will also be added, through later Play Store updates, according to Essential.
The update also comes with some enhancements to the Essential Phone’s 360 camera module. The update adds spacial sound with the help of the module’s four microphones. It also allows module owners to use the volume keys as shutter buttons. Lastly, the company has added a countdown timer for selfies in 360 mode.
One of, if not the biggest, issues with the Essential Phone is its incomplete camera. The 13-megapixel camera works very slowly, according to MobileSyrup’s Igor Bonifacic review of the device, “the Essential’s camera is slow to start up, slow to focus, slow to trigger the shutter and slow to save an image.”
This is one of the many updates in hopes to bring the Essential Phone’s camera up to standards.
Update NMI81C will start rolling out today.
source: Essential via: 9to5Google
