SP3 camera too blurry?

[qwertyy]

Am I the only one having this problem?
I am a student and I take pictures of the lecture notes to convert them into pdf. When I use my galaxy note 3, the image of the document is extremely clear. However, when I take the same picture with my SP3, it is extremely blurry.
Is this something that can be resolved?

 

[ctitanic]

Am I the only one having this problem?
I am a student and I take pictures of the lecture notes to convert them into pdf. When I use my galaxy note 3, the image of the document is extremely clear. However, when I take the same picture with my SP3, it is extremely blurry.
Is this something that can be resolved?

You are not alone. The sad reality is that the SP3 uses a fixed focus camera which is not ideal for scanning documents. My workaround is to scan using my Lumia 810 Windows Phone using a program that sends the scanned documents to Onedrive.

 

[79jonesy]

Yep I agree it's not great. It's a real shame you have to add to your workflow but I agree - using your phone is the way forward. I either use onenote on my iPhone and select the document option or add the photo to onedrive.

 

[~X.T.~]

Yup, fixed-focus camera. Microsoft engineers must have had a brain fart when they came to the camera.

On the other hand, any DIY-ers out there thinking of whipping up a clip-on corrective lens for the SP3? Shorten that ridiculous focal length a bit so that we can take snaps of close-up things?

I thought of doing something like that but am really too engrossed with schoolwork to work on it. Am not too sure where to start either...

 

[Moonsurface]

Yup, fixed-focus camera. Microsoft engineers must have had a brain fart when they came to the camera.

On the other hand, any DIY-ers out there thinking of whipping up a clip-on corrective lens for the SP3? Shorten that ridiculous focal length a bit so that we can take snaps of close-up things?

I thought of doing something like that but am really too engrossed with schoolwork to work on it. Am not too sure where to start either...

Something like this would probably work. I used to use one on an old non-smart phone, it just had a glue magnetic circle that went round the lens on the camera to which the addon lens would fix.

http://www.365astronomy.com/circle-...UssQKgg39cscFUYUUQURqTGpsL1GyupSlkaAglj8P8HAQ

 

[az1787]

I ordered one Logitech Pro c920 camera. It has Carl Zeiss 15mpx lens! Next week I'll tell you how it goes with SP3. Noone will buy this addon lens?

 

[nick kramarich]

I have a surfaxe pro 3 and the camera is absolutely horrible. I cannot take a picture for my life on this thing. The camera is always out of focus and it literally cannot focus. I hate the camera so much but the rest of the device performs very well.

 

[VickiFL]

I never use my SP3 to take a picture. I always use my Lumia 1520 because it has a great camera.

 

[Redguard]

Like many others, I've come to learn a little too late how bad the camera is.

My story:
My wife has a document and wants the text from the document posted on a website. She says, "I'm too lazy to retype all of this. Does your new Surface toy have any solutions?" and I'm like, "Yeah babe, my Surface can do ANYTHING! I'll just snap a pic of the pages and use OneNote's OCR to convert everything to text!!"
So then I hold the Surface over the document (which is in size 12 Arial font) and I can't get it to focus. Thought maybe I needed more light so I went to the most well-lit room in the house. Same problem. Everything was blurry and no matter how much I tried, the best I could do was to get half of the document into focus. Everything else was too blurry for OneNote to perform the OCR on.
Feeling humiliated, I just typed out the document for her.

Sidenote: Before resorting to typing, I even tried taking a picture with my iPhone (which focused well and gave great resolution) and saving it into a OneNote document. Not sure what was going on that day, but my OneNote wouldn't sync for some reason and the picture wouldn't upload to OneDrive. Really weird day.

Am I disappointed? Yes. Do I hate my SP3 now? No... I still like it and I still think it's leaps and bounds better than an iPad. But as others have said, for the $$$ I dropped on this thing, it should have a auto-focus on the camera. My iPhone has spoiled me in this regard.

 

[jnjroach]

It's not the best answer, but the fixed focus it's set to about 3 feet so for scanning that it's your best bet for readable text.

 

[JonyGreen]

So then I hold the Surface over the document (which is in size 12 Arial font) and I can't get it to focus. Thought maybe I needed more light so I went to the most well-lit room in the house. Same problem. Everything was blurry and no matter how much I tried, the best I could do was to get half of the document into focus. Everything else was too blurry for OneNote to perform the OCR on.

i think OneNote is a good ocr tool, i use it for long.