A quick overview of the new Nexus's photographic capabilities Google's Nexus smartphones don't have the best reputation when it comes to photography. The Galaxy Nexus's rear camera was a pretty big disappointment, and the Nexus 4's was little more than adequate, despite the introduction of new features like Photosphere. So will this year be any different? Google certainly seems to thinks so — the LG-built Nexus 5 is pitched as a device for capturing "the everyday and the epic," boasting a new HDR+ mode and optical image stabilization (OIS) while maintaining megapixel parity with the last-gen Nexus, with its 8MP rear shooter. It also boasts a larger 1/3.2-inch sensor and f/2.4 aperture. But is it any good in the real world? Let's find out after the break.

General pho​tography with the Nexus 5 Spoiler alert: We finally have a Nexus phone with a good camera! We'll talk at length about the Nexus 5's camera in our full review, but the short condensed version, based on a couple of days' use, is this: We finally have a Nexus with a pretty good camera. It's not barnstormingly awesome, but it's above average, and you can take good pictures with it in most conditions. In particular we've been impressed with the N5's performance in darker scenes and with the new HDR+ mode, which we'll discuss later. We've also been impressed with how little noise makes it into our shots — either Google has a fancy new noise-reduction algorithm, or it's just using a much higher-quality sensor in the Nexus 5 — either way, 100 percent crops reveal almost no visible noise, and that's great to see. Areas of weakness include the stock camera app itself — the menu ring is pretty fiddly, and many of the controls lack the immediacy of "skinned" rivals like Samsung's TouchWiz camera app. There's also a tendency to slightly grey-out black areas in some shots, particularly in overcast conditions. That's nothing you can't fix in ten seconds with Snapseed or Photoshop, but it's something we've noticed consistently, and a point worth noting. Nevertheless, the Nexus 5 has a fine camera for regular use. To get an idea of what we're talking about, check our short gallery of shots below. (These are a mix of regular and HDR+ shots.) HDR+ mode on the Nexus 5 Replacing the regular HDR mode from the Nexus 4, the N5's HDR+ mode combines high dynamic range photography with sharpening algorithms with the aim to produce clear and sharp photos even with very dark and very bright areas visible. Curiously, HDR+ shots seem to come out a little smaller than regular photos, likely due to the software leaving some wiggle room for camera movement. We've seen HDR modes come and go on Android cameras over the years. On recent devices like the Galaxy S4 and Xperia Z1 they've gotten pretty good. And Google's HDR+ mode certainly delivers. Like all good HDR modes, it successfully picks out detail in bright and dark areas, but the selective sharpening that's applied to photos is what makes it truly impressive. Edges in HDR+ shots are extremely sharp, almost unnaturally so. And this is all done (for the vast majority of cases) without adding any appreciable visual noise. Like other HDR modes, HDR+ takes a little longer to shoot and process, due to the fact that it combines photos of different exposures. The processing part is done in the background, though, meaning you don't have to deal with any progress bars. HDR+ can run into issues with movement, however, as you'll see in the second set of comparison images below. The people in the foreground are blurred and obscured by noise. Not surprising — as the phone has to have time to take multiple exposures. Left images: Auto mode; Right images: HDR+ mode 100 percent crops These 680-by-383 snapshots are taken from full-resolution versions of some of the shots above. The first two are HDR+ shots — and as you can see, the sharpening algorithm used in this mode does an excellent job of sharpening edges without adding noise in elsewhere in the image.