985077 - [Camera] Unable to take picture against dark surface with flash turned off

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(Firefox OS Graveyard :: Gaia::Camera, enhancement)

Description

[Hema Koka [:hema]]

From Qualcomm's testing:

Issue: 7. Turn off the flash and try to take a picture against a dark surface (ex: keyboard), camera auto focuses but doesn’t take picture.

Device: QRD 8x26/8x28 
Build: Tip of Camera-New-Features and mozilla-central on 3/17

Please reproduce with devices that you have

Comment 1

[Hema Koka [:hema]]

Mike, Could you take a shot at reproducing this and doing the initial investigation

Comment 2

[Mike Habicher [:mikeh] (high bugzilla latency)]

Can one of the Gaia team confirm that the camera still calls takePicture() even if the autoFocus callback returns failure?

Comment 3

[Hema Koka [:hema]]

Need input from product/Amy on this (whats happening now is what is implemented; wilson says that he fixed it on master and rebased it to branch because there was a bug asking for this change -- wilson: please add the bug number here

Comment 4

[Mike Habicher [:mikeh] (high bugzilla latency)]

FYI, the previous change was in bug 975697.

Comment 5

[Amy Lee [:amylee] UX]

(In reply to Hema Koka [:hema] from comment #3)
> Need input from product/Amy on this (whats happening now is what is
> implemented; wilson says that he fixed it on master and rebased it to branch
> because there was a bug asking for this change -- wilson: please add the bug
> number here

Hi Hema, 

I'm not sure what feedback is needed here from a visual design standpoint. Can you clarify? Thanks

Comment 6

[Amy Lee [:amylee] UX]

Hi Hema, 

I'm not sure what feedback is needed here from a visual design standpoint. Can you clarify? Thanks

Comment 7

[Mike Habicher [:mikeh] (high bugzilla latency)]

Hi Amy, we've got conflicting opinions on whether or not the camera should take a picture when autofocus fails, so we're turning to UX for clarification.

My $0.02: when the user presses the shutter button, s/he should get a picture, even if it's a bad one.

Comment 8

[Amy Lee [:amylee] UX]

(In reply to Mike Habicher [:mikeh] from comment #7)
> Hi Amy, we've got conflicting opinions on whether or not the camera should
> take a picture when autofocus fails, so we're turning to UX for
> clarification.
> 
> My $0.02: when the user presses the shutter button, s/he should get a
> picture, even if it's a bad one.

Hi Mike, 

I agree. I'm going to needinfo Tiffany on this since she's UX.

Comment 9

[Hema Koka [:hema]]

amy: sorry for not being clear...way too many bug updates today :)

Comment 10

[Tiffanie Shakespeare [:tif]]

Attachment: super dark photo of my fleece

I also think it should just take the photo and, at least on the build I'm on, it lets you do that.

Comment 11

[Hema Koka [:hema]]

wilsonpage: any update on this?

Comment 12

[Wilson Page [:wilsonpage]]

Attachment: pull-request (camera-new-features)

Comment 13

[Diego Marcos [:dmarcos]]

Landed on camera-new-features:

https://github.com/mozilla-b2g/gaia/commit/f449a48ddda139e59ba62581bd3d2f2f6c10cb93

Comment 15

[Mike Habicher [:mikeh] (high bugzilla latency)]

Removed [madai] tag from summary since this issue wasn't madai-specific.

Comment 17

[Jason Smith [:jsmith]]

Reopening per QC's request, as this apparently happens on 1.4 right now as well, which means this isn't resolved.

Comment 18

[Hema Koka [:hema]]

justin or wilson: 

QC wants this bug fixed first on 1.4 based on the comments/emails (from what i understand they can't wait until camera-new-features to merge into master and then to 1.4). Can you create a PR and add inder from Qualcomm to test if the patch works on QRD. 

Thanks
Hema

Comment 19

[Justin D'Arcangelo [:justindarc]]

I can take this.

Comment 20

[Justin D'Arcangelo [:justindarc]]

Attachment: pull-request (v1.4)

Pull request to fix in v1.4 branch.

Comment 21

[David Flanagan [:djf]]

Comment on attachment 8395837 [details] [review]
pull-request (v1.4)

Looks good. Thank you for keeping this as a one-line patch and not including the unrelated changes from Wilson's original patch.

Comment 22

[David Flanagan [:djf]]

Landed to v1.4: https://github.com/mozilla-b2g/gaia/commit/c5a6536e71fa303783692a6ba113b001e9d19473

Keeping the bug open because we still have to land this to master.

Comment 23

[Hema Koka [:hema]]

QC says this is causing another regression, please test:

From Sameer: Able to take picture even when we cover the camera sensor with hand, that compromises the autofocus functionality. (It’s valid if there is an option to turn off the autofocus)

Comment 24

[Justin D'Arcangelo [:justindarc]]

The issue resolved by this patch was that we were not taking pictures if autofocus failed (which was the case when sometimes taking a picture against a dark surface). So, the new behavior is to *always* take the picture regardless of if autofocus fails. Is that not correct?

Setting NEEDINFO for Tiffanie to get perspective on this from UX

Comment 25

[Tiffanie Shakespeare [:tif]]

Yep you got it Justin! We don't want to prevent the user from taking  photos just because focus fails. Perhaps it's purposeful, perhaps it's only slightly out of focus, perhaps they don't care and just want to capture the event - we'll let the user make that call; they can always delete photos they don't want.

What we want is to avoid the frustration of not being able to take a photo at all because the user can't get the lens to focus and the million dollar shot of a UFO landing is lost forever.

(In reply to Justin D'Arcangelo [:justindarc] from comment #24)
> The issue resolved by this patch was that we were not taking pictures if
> autofocus failed (which was the case when sometimes taking a picture against
> a dark surface). So, the new behavior is to *always* take the picture
> regardless of if autofocus fails. Is that not correct?
> 
> Setting NEEDINFO for Tiffanie to get perspective on this from UX

Comment 26

[Hema Koka [:hema]]

Closing this as fixed - since it was implemented per original request and also per ux team's input.

Comment 27

[David Flanagan [:djf]]

Bulk edit for camera bugs.

If earlier comments do not show how this bug landed to master, it probably landed as part of https://github.com/mozilla-b2g/gaia/pull/17599 which merged the camera-new-features branch into master.

This bug was uplifted from master to v1.4 as part of https://github.com/mozilla-b2g/gaia/commit/a8190d08e61316a86bba572ba8d894d081a20530

Comment 28

[sarsenyev]

The issue doesn't reproduce on the latest 1.4 and master build.
A user is able to take pictures against dark surface with flash turned off

1.4 Environmental Variables:
Device: Buri 1.4 MOZ
BuildID: 20140410000201
Gaia: 9b2da43dfee3792cd311ae55f0b06272313208f0
Gecko: 9d9ead7d6afa
Version: 30.0a2
Firmware Version: v1.2-device.cfg

1.5 Environmental Variables:
Device: Buri 1.5 MOZ
BuildID: 20140410040201
Gaia: 9d0b1bdf746823a94b13e6574c1d8304dc584763
Gecko: 690c810c8e3e
Version: 31.0a1
Firmware Version: v1.2-device.cfg