CyanogenMod Team Debuts Focal, Their Own Camera App Built From The Ground Up

It’s no secret that the stock Android camera is a bit…underwhelming. The UI itself is alright. But it’s the performance that results in the most disappointment. The disappointment is even more pronounced when you compare a device like the Galaxy S4 which as a pretty awesome camera (hardware and software) with the Google Edition S4. Comparison pictures between the two show that there is a noticeable degradation in the Google Edition photos over the Touch Whiz version.

One solution is to install a 3rd party camera app. But for custom ROM users, there’s now a new, much more promising solution – Cyanogenmod’s “Focal”.

Focal is the community’s new built-from-scratch camera app. At launch, the app is still pretty robust and offers toggles for the front facing camera, panorama mode and a few others such as a burst mode, the ability to take photos while shooting video and an improved HDR mode. Focusing can be down by the usual tap-to-focus as well as manually dragging the view finder to wherever you want to focus. Even cooler, though, is that the Cyanogenmod team completely built from scratch their own Photosphere replacement, “PicSphere”, as an open source alternative.

For now, it might feel a bit beta around the edges. But given the Cyanogenmod community’s huge following and diverse support, we have no doubt that Focal will quickly improve and in time, possibly even surpass some of the high end (software) camera systems from HTC, Samsung, Nokia and more.

Via: Geek