My primary camera for day-to-day photos remains my smartphone, for various self-explanatory reasons. It’s portable, has a high-quality lens with reasonable detail and post processing, comes with significant storage space, can shoot high-definition videos, is easy to carry around, and stays with me no matter where I go, allowing me to capture moments wherever and whenever I want. The truth is, smartphones, especially the high-end ones, have revolutionized how we look at amateur digital photography. While nothing beats a true DSLR camera, or even a normal dedicated point-and-shoot one, smartphone cameras have upped the game a few notches recently, and if you consider Nokia’s PureView 808 to be any indicator of what’s to come, with its 41MP sensor and outstanding photo quality, things definitely seem to be headed in the right direction.
While the gap is bridging pretty quick, at least of now, there are still complaints with the output quality that the bulk of mobile cameras give. While there are apps that can get better results out of the same hardware, nothing beats the usefulness and the feel of being able to change something at system level. In the latest Android phones, that’s become increasingly popular, thanks to the ability to edit the phone’s media_profiles.xml file for changing various parameters at the driver instruction stage. Earlier, we brought to you the method for improving Nexus 4 camera, video recording and audio quality. Inspired by the same concept, a similar mod is now available for LG Optimus G, with the added advantage of being available as a pre-edited file that you just need to put in the right location for it to take effect.
Here’s what you will gain out of this mod:
- Increased bitrate of 20Mbps for video recording at 1080p
- Audio recording bitrate for both 720p and 1080p resolutions increased to 320kbps
- Two audio channels being used for 1080p video recording
- Image decoding memory cap doubled to 40MB
- Increase all image encoding quality values to 100
Of course, this is what the pre-edited package gives you, and the user is free to make their own amendments as they see fit.
To use the mod, head over to the source link below and grab the media_profiles.xml for your LG Optimus G. Then, assuming you have a rooted device (the hack will work on rooted phones only), use a root-level browser (like Root Explorer or ES File Explorer) to navigate to /system/etc folder, where you will have your current media_profiles.xml. Replace the current file with the one you downloaded, and reboot the phone. Your settings are not in effect.
It’s advisable to take a back up of your current configuration before attempting any such mod. For more details and downloads, check out the XDA forum link below.
(Source: XDA-Developers forum thread)
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