Extreme Camera Lag On Nexus 4

Using the following very simple camera preview activity (from a google example found here), the Nexus 4 camera is noticeably slower that the device's standard camera application: p

Solution 1:

I have found that the preview frame rate can be increased to a normal rate by setting the recording hint to true, but this severely decreases camera performance especially in medium to low light situations with regard to color saturation and contrast (I am shocked at the quality of the front facing camera given that this is Google's latest and greatest attempt to compete with the iPhone 5 and her quality cameras... can't wait for the X Phone).

This is not a solution to the problem, but it is something of a band-aid for developers looking to avoid shocking frame rates.

Solution 2:

If you set the picture-size to 3264x2448, this will fix it. Even if you don't ever take a picture the picture-size is important because ZSL is enabled by default. The default picture size is 640x480 and this causes the slow preview frame rate. Disabling ZSL makes the preview even faster which is why setting the recording hit to true helps, enabling HDR does the same thing.