Portable Motorola Edge 40 Neo Mini-Review

Okay, so, the camera's got a problem. It's a software problem, but still.

In low and mid lighting, it's great. No complaints.

In bright lighting, particularly outdoors... it's terrible. Everything looks like it's had a sharpening filter turned up to 11 on it. Awful.



A bit of experimentation shows it's the auto-HDR setting. Which was moved, by Motorola, behind the camera app's settings menu instead of as a toggle on the main interface like it used to be. "Better" still, it defaults to on. I mean, every time you open the app.

So, if you don't want your outdoor shots looking like an acid dream, you have to: open the camera app, tap settings, tap photos, tap auto-HDR, come out of settings, take photo. Then if you come out of the app at any point, you'll have to go back into settings, tap photos, tap auto-HDR, come out of settings again. Gah!

There's another workaround: you can use "pro" mode to save your shot as a DNG and process it yourself. But who wants to burn 25MB every time they press the shutter button?!

I'm really hoping another camera update will put the HDR toggle back on the main interface again...

You can fiddle in post, of course, by dropping the highlights RIGHT down, but still. Boo-urns.

 

Yeah, I'm playing with Open Camera, which is still a thing. Pig-ugly, but it works. It'll only see the main sensor, though, not the wide-and-macro one.

 

It's a whole thing. In short, it may be possible. Or not. Depends on how Google was feeling on the day your Android build was released...

While you're in the settings, flick it over to Camera API 2 - unlocks more features.

 

Okay, this "auto-HDR" thing is really peeing me off now.

Tried to snap a quick shot of the kids before we went into an event, in bright sunshine:



That's a white costume. Absolutely unusable.

Here's the same costume, with auto-HDR turned off:



Okay, sure, it's blown out to hell, but at least it's sodding white.

They really need a way for you to be able to turn auto-HDR off and leave it off.

Oh, and the kicker? Open Camera does it too! Yeah, that came as a surprise.

Shoulda splashed out on the Fairphone!

 

I have a workaround, at least.

Here's a piece of white paper, shot with the Moto Camera app:


Here's the same paper, taken seconds later, using a hacked copy of Google Camera:



That'll do. I'll only use the Moto Camera app when I want to access the wide-angle/macro lens.

EDIT:
It also fixes the horrible over processing problem! I'm picking the youngest up from school right now, but I'll post samples when I'm back.

 

So, over-processing. 1:1 crops, so worst-case.

Moto Camera:



The wall looks nothing like that in real life.

Google Camera:



The wall looks very much like that in real life.

Interestingly, HDR is enabled in both cases: "auto-HDR" in the Moto Camera case, and "HDR+" in the Google Camera case. There's also "HDR+ Enhanced" on Google Camera, but that slows down capture so I haven't bothered with it.

EDIT:
Far be it from me to fall down the rabbit-hole of conspiracy, but... given that pretty much all of Motorola's phones use the same 50 megapixel sensor, you don't reckon they're deliberately mangling the photos on the cheaper models so that you splash out to upgrade?

...

 

So, gcam - Google Camera to its friends - only works on Google-authorised devices. Because of course.

But gcam is, y'know, software. So it's possible to find the bits that say "if not pixel then return(1)" and just kinda... remove 'em.

And there are people who have done exactly that... and released it for anyone to play with.

It's a little buggy, as you'd expect, but apparently less buggy than Moto Camera(!)

It'll also almost certainly only work with your phone's main front-and-rear sensors, ignoring any additional sensors for depth/wide-angle/telephoto/macro, but you can install it alongside your vendor's own camera app and just load that when you need the extra features.

Now, you're installing a piece of software that has definitely been futzed with by a hacker - but hopefully one of the good kind. APKMirror says that file is safe to install, Virustotal says nothing detects it as malware, and the Google Play scanner hasn't complained... but you're still rolling the dice a little bit. What can I say, I like to live on the edge.

 

I've been playing with the hacked gcam a bit more, and it's fine. Only two real glitches I've found so far.

The first: if you try to open it using a camera shortcut, like double-tapping the power button or wristy-twisty, it crashes. Works fine if you tap the app icon, but anything else just kills it. Weird.

Even weirder... you can't disable HDR+. Well, you can, kinda, in that it'll let you, but here's what you get (1:1 crop):



Yeah. If I turn HDR+ on, I get this:



It's not a problem, 'cos unlike Moto Camera's auto-HDR HDR+ doesn't ruin photos. But yeah, strange one that. It's like it's capturing a low-res image and scaling it up or something.

 

Having played a bit more, the settings seem to need a little translation:

HDR+ Off = Use Only a Quarter of the Sensor's Pixels For Some Reason
HDR+ On = HDR+ Off
HDR+ Enhanced = HDR+ On

Good to know!