Android L - Camera2 API - Interesting RAW capture support

[Jim Brown]

For me, this is one of the exciting areas of development for Android. The new Android 5 release has support for capturing and saving RAW (DNG) formats. This should allow for greater manipulation of the data than what a lossy JPG capture allows.

https://developer.android.com/reference/android/hardware/camera2/package-summary.html


I have seen some really impressive results taken from a Nexus 5 running the preview Lollypop and camera software taking advantage of the RAW capture:

http://imgur.com/a/qQkkR#17

http://i.imgur.com/QwHjnlM.jpg

http://imgur.com/a/KkILh#7

See also this lengthly REDDIT thread:
http://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/2joqyh/l_camera_dng_samples_from_nexus_5_and_what_you/

Exciting times ahead.

 

[thedesolatesoul]

I think the real power of the Camera2 API is in the pipelined processing and ability to send the image directly to rendecscript and such.
I dont see an advantage to having RAW data just for pictures, as it takes up too much space.