A piece of code which was found in Android has evidence that Google is working to bring RAW file format support to Android devices using a completely new Camera API. This is something that would mean a lot to the photographers who user Android devices, and the company has also been showing a lot of interest in photography off late with their updates to Google+ and other photography related products.
It was initially Nokia which bought the RAW file format capability to the smartphones, and it was received well by the photographers and other photography enthusiasts. Now, Google is trying to take on the photographers with its new Camera API that can come up in the upcoming Android versions. One of the API suggests that the company’s interest to bring stock support for modular and external cameras.
The new APIs are also said to be backward compatible, but then, the completely compatibility will be for the devices that might come out in the future, with higher processing power maybe.
As of today, the smartphones shoot images and process them to the JPEG format, which obviously has a lot of loss in the details due to compression. But RAW images would allow the photographer to edit the images the way he wants, after shooting the picture. All these APIs and technologies for smartphones are bridging the gap between the DSLRs and smartphone cameras.
Image Source: Digital Trends