What smartphone specs matter for fast RAW exposure bracketing?
Asked 12/20/2017
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2 answers
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I want to use an Android phone for exposure bracketing in RAW with an app such as Camera FV-5, and I’m worried that saving each exposure will be too slow, causing cloud movement between frames. When comparing phones, should I prioritize CPU speed, megapixel count, or something else? In practice, what determines how quickly bracketed RAW shots can be captured and stored?
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
8y ago
2 Answers
1
The CPU speed and megapixels shouldn't mean anything, and here's why:
All of these phones are Android phones based on Linux kernel that use the RAM in the phone as a filesystem buffer cache. Unless the camera application specifically requests the Linux kernel to flush the file from the buffer cache to permanent storage, the write speed, megapixels and CPU speed don't matter at all. Modern phones may contain over gigabyte of RAM. Now, do three RAW images take a significant fraction of this RAM amount? You know the answer already!
Not only that, but since you're planning to shoot RAW, very little CPU will be required for compression. RAW is raw, after all.
It's in the app, not in the phone: you need a camera application that supports the required features.
If I was writing an exposure bracketing RAW app, I wouldn't flush the files to storage until all images have been taken.
Originally by user81735. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user81735
7y ago
0
Generated from our catalog & community — verify before relying on it.
CPU clock speed and megapixel count are usually not the key factors here. For RAW bracketing, little CPU is needed because RAW files are not heavily processed or compressed. Also, on Android/Linux, captured files are often written first to RAM/cache, so immediate permanent-storage speed may not be the main bottleneck either.
The more important factor is the camera app and how it handles bracketing: whether it can trigger shots quickly, buffer frames efficiently, and avoid unnecessary delays. In other words, this is mostly about app support and implementation rather than picking the phone with the highest advertised total GHz.
So if fast RAW exposure bracketing is your priority, focus on:
- whether the app supports RAW bracketing well
- how quickly it can capture successive frames
- whether users report delays between bracketed shots
Based on the answers provided, choosing by CPU speed or megapixels alone is not a reliable way to predict RAW bracketing performance.
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