S24 Ultra camera showing vibrating images at 1x/2x magnification

[AdmT]

My camera on my S24 Ultra is showing vibrating images at 1x and 2x magnification. Higher, eg 3x or more or 0.6x are ok. An option to select item to focus does not appear. Any ideas?

[SSGPhoneGuru]

Try clearing the phone's cache and report back with the results. Good luck!

[AdmT]

I lcleared the camera cache. No change
I then cleared the caches via entering recovery mode.
No change..

[maird]

By all means I support the suggestion to the clear the phone's cache but I have to ask...

Which camera sensor and what was the shutter speed?

What you're describing sounds like camera shake, it will be enhanced if using a sensor and a higher zoom than it's optical zoom range. Which results in cropping and often enlarging the frame to 4k 4:3 or 12MP. I only have a S25U as a reference and it is different but I'm sure the same behaviors will exist. At most only two of the sensors will have a zoom lens and probably none of those has an optical zoom as low as 0.6.x The only one that does is probably the 12MP ultrawide angle sensor but it's probably fixed at 0.6x optical zoom (like on my S25U) so any increase in app zoom level without changing the sensor will be "digital" zoom by cropping and probably expand the frame. So, 2x digital zoom is about equivalent to taking 3.6MP of the 12MP frame then expanding it back to 12MP. That would twice enhance camera shake because the useful sensor resolution is reduced and the useful sensor pixels are used for more than one pixel in the final frame. The shake is not caused by the crop and expand, it is probably literally the natural motion of your hand. You can quickly test if that's so by bracing the phone on something solid and not moving while using the zoom, e.g. a wall or table. In your hand you can reduce it a bit by doing something like placing the phone, screen-up in the palm of your preferred hand, bend your pinkie finger to create a shelf and rest the one side of the phone bottom on in. Hold your thumb above the screen and curl the rest of your fingers around the back of the phone without covering any of the cameras and pull it into the gap between your thumb and first finger while still letting your pinkie support the bottom. Push your elbow of the same arm against your body so that your upper arm runs down the side of your torso and keep it there, only use your upper arm to position the phone but keep it close to your body, use the three axes of your wrist to compose the picture and your thumb of hand holding the phone (or other hand) to control the camera, e.g. press the shutter release. Thumb is better. That and bracing the phone or your body are only tests to see if camera shake can be mitigated you dont have to take all photographs that way but you'd learn methods for stabilizing the phone.

On the S25U I would tend to solve this several general ways. First, is there something I can do to prevent a low shutter speed and reduces camera shake, i.e. photograph a brighter scene. Then, I'd make sure I was using a sensor suitable for the scene, the only one that provides 0.6x zoom has a lens best suited for very broad landscapes or extremely close subjects (an inch or two from the camera). By using a higher resolution sensor or a sensor that has a higher focal length. Doing this I'd expect to be able to reduce shake on a given scene at a distances over a few feet away.

Note that the S25U and almost certainly the S24U camera app in it's simplest mode may switch cameras as you change zoom level but 2x zoom on the UW camera isn't the same as 2x zoom on the T (telephoto) camera because the focal length of each lens is different so I find it a bit pointless and tend to use the camera in Pro or Expert RAW mode only then deliberately select the camera sensor (from UW W T ST as well as the max resolution available for it) then limit myself to only using the optical zoom range it supports to avoid the camera doing the crop and expand but do my own cropping in another app (Gallery, Photos, Lightdesk, etc.).

[AdmT]

As I didnt notice this issue in my first year of ownership, I suspect it is damage to a photo sensor.
Attached is the best I got investing using a furniture item for support.

[SSGPhoneGuru]

You could be right there it might be the sensor itself. I thought maybe it could be software related as I owned a OnePlus 7 phone that received an update that broke the camera. They later released an update to fix it, but by then I had moved on to a new manufacturer. I was just thinking as well, try downloading good lock and using the camera assist program and play with the settings and see what that does... Maybe you can find something helpful in that program.

[maird]

That looks like out of focus rather than vibration. It's hard to be certain but it looks like the focal length is too short. Camera shake as a source of vibration would skew some contrast lines but in all cases what I see is broadening of contrast lines. Since that broadening is on all sides of rectangles that have as much as 45 degrees of alignment difference (e.g. the dark shapes left of the picture on the wall versus the shapes on the decending vertical face of the quilt nearest the camera have different orientation of their contrast lines but all are blurred apparently on all edges). I doubt any vibration would be able to blur edges in four non-aligned axes like that. Plus, the long view through the door is sufficient to expect it's not focussed at a distant focal point. Have you tried selecting a subject for focus on the screen, touch and hold a point you consider the subject, one or two circles should appear in white then turn yellow when the subject selection is complete. I saw someone else decribe similar behavior after a recent S24+ update and in that case there were what looked like blurring from overlapping duplicate images suggesting a very short focal length. You can also try just putting your spare hand into the scene a few inches from the cameras and moving it slowly away from and towards the phone without touching it and watch the screen to see if you can identify the distance where your moving hand is in focus. Then removing your hand might be enough to restart the autofocus on the real scene but I wouldn't expect it. If you can select focus mode in the camera then AF-C (center based focus) would be best for testing with yur hand in the scene. If manual focus is available you could test it to see if it is a focus issue but manual focus isn't very precise everyday use, you'd just be using it to see if you get better results than autofocus then report a bug to Support for the camera app.

[AdmT]

The camera is working at all magnifications again . I do believe a loose connection on a sensor was the issue. I'll just leave it at that.