S25 Camera focus terrible

[DarthAmberly]

Has anyone had any success changing any camera settings? The focus is just awful and everything is grainy, no matter if I'm in pro camera and/or 12mp vs 50mp. 

Also cleared data/cache. I'm specifically looking for any settings changes

I only upgraded from my flip4 in hopes for a better camera and it's somehow worse😭 

[Robin621k]

I have a silly question.

Do you have camera lens protectors on your device?

[DarthAmberly]

No

[Robin621k]

Do you live near a Samsung service center, it's free to evaluate your phone.

[DarthAmberly]

There is nothing wrong with the camera itself, it is a software issue

[maird]

There are two cameras that claim 50MP when I use the S25U camera app. The Ultrawide has no optical zoom, you may as well use 0.6x zoom in order to get maximum frame size. It has a huge field-of-view so very little detail except for very close subjects. You may as well treat the wide-angle 200MP like a SLR standard lens (50mm) though it's actually equivalent to a 24mm focal length. Only ever use 1x zoom to get the maximum frame size and it is the only camera/lens with image stabilization. It should be very good for close subjects. Crop the scene you want another way than zoom and stay at 1x zoom. The Telephoto is the other 50MP camera but only has optical zoom between 1x and 5x so stay in that range for maximum frame size. It can appear grainy when zooming outside that range because the frames are cropped and expanded but are also usually only 12MP I find. That can reduce image detail a lot, making it look grainy. The Super Telephoto is only a 12MP sensor but has optical zoom from 1x to 3x only. Anything higher is crop and expand so you lose detail and it quickly becomes blurry. To be honest even though the super telephoto (12MP) has about half the focal length of the telephoto each at 1x zoom it has a quarter of the resolution. So the 50MP telephoto has better detail for most scenes than the 12MP super telephoto and I rarely use the 12MP camera. These aren't the only "good" approach and everyone has a differrent scene. But I limit my use to the above approach and frequently get nice scenes with no obvious grain. As a last point, remember the screen has lower resolution than any of the cameras. It's worth expanding the image to the maximum on the screen when viewing and scrolling around it to see the "real" grain.

[DarthAmberly]

I'm actually having the most trouble with close objects. Especially anything small. It wants to focus on background rather than the foreground. And it doesn't visibily struggle in and out of focus, but rather it doesn't grab anything well.

But I do notice everything else you said for regular photos of mid to far distances. That's when it's just cruddy and super grainy

[maird]

Touch (some camera modes it's better to touch and hold) the subject on the camera scene to set it as the focal point and to be used for exposure. Use Expert Raw mode and set the focus mode to center, not multi-point. Remember the subject doesn't have to fill the frame at 200MP at 1x zoom so you don't have to get extremely close to get an image you can crop a good subject view from. Also, the wide-angle will have more depth of field on an insect with a background if you stay further back and use cropping rather than zoom to fill the scene with an insect subject. If that doesn't help use the 50MP telephoto, prefer 1x zoom but limit zoom to a maximum of 5x, use expert raw, with autofocus set to center not mutipoint, touch (and hold) on the subject to set a preferred focal point, and it's still a huge frame so you don't have to get too close to give you a frame you can get a good crop from. With subjects as active as typical insects you will probably have to take as many as tens of photographs to get one good one.

[DarthAmberly]

Yes, sadly tried all that already and no luck. And taking a bunch of photos with different settings and zooms worked for my zflip4 but this s25 really captures a cruddy photo, despite having a whole extra camera lol

[maird]

As a last idea, consider that your hand or a moving flower with an insect on it, even in a very light breeze, will probably not track the needed focal length as fast as any scene tens of feet or more away. The adjustment required for a very near scene usually needs to be very fast. Be sure the ISO gives you a fast shutter speed, I'd consider 1/250th a second as a minimum to use as a starting point. As a last resort you can try manual focus, it won't help with hand or a flower the subject is on. But you can set it to a flower, shorten the focal length by the minimum adjustment and wait for the next insect to land. Adjust and retry for the following insect. If the camera had a real aperture iris you could truly adjust the depth of field to compensate.