I’m working on an app that uses the camera function and this problem has been bugging me for quite a while now. The camera preview of my Galaxy Spica appears dark! I don’t know why but discovered that the problem will go away after snapping a photo, view it and then go back to preview mode.
Well, I just couldn’t live with it anymore and got my best friend, google to help me search for root cause and solution. Not much result except for forum topics threads. So I too am not sure of the cause. There is a mention of the camera software bug. However there is also a suspect that there is a hardware conflict between the camera and wifi. I verified that out. Indeed, I am getting a dark preview only when the wifi is turned on. So this should be a firmware bug.
I found no official fix. I found a custom fix (antibyte camera bugfix2) but that requires some work since it needs flashing in mod firmware (samdroid kitchen). But I’m not going to dive in and risk turning my one and only test device into a brick. Not just yet :). I need my device to work on my app. Simple workaround for me now is wifi off unless required.
A comment that Samsung i5700 has a good hacking community is true. They have fixes for common issues that does not have official fix such as this as well as add functionality that is not available out of the box. I’m interested with enabling the multitouch.
