Ready, aim, aim, fire

Before this phone was even announced, leaked photos and information about the Nexus 5 made the camera a point of gossip and controversy. It's no secret that Android phones have a rough record with quality shooters (especially in comparison to the efforts of Apple and Nokia), and Google and LG's previous work on the Nexus 4 didn't leave a great taste in anyone's mouth. Rumors swirled that the Nexus 5 was going to be different.

The truth is, it's a lot more of the same, at least right now. In a word: disappointing.

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The 8-megapixel camera on the back of the Nexus 5 is certainly capable of taking rather beautiful photos in the perfect setting. Unfortunately for us, life is not filled with perfect settings — and when you're faced with real-world picture taking, the camera underperforms constantly and consistently. The Nexus 5 takes photos and video with too little contrast, too little saturation, and too little color (or inconsistent color) — when you can get the camera to focus at all. Low light performance isn’t exactly poor, but getting it to snap the picture you want at the moment you want will drive you absolutely nuts. The camera app can be absurdly slow to focus and even slow to launch in the first place, which makes the Nexus 5 as a camera an exercise in frustration. It instills no confidence — and after a while I simply expected the phone to produce bad results. Side by side with almost any other flagship phone, its camera doesn’t hold up.

Let me just reiterate this point: in the right light, with a steady hand and no moving (or slow-moving) subjects, the camera can take excellent photos. It’s actually really upsetting because it suggests the Nexus 5 is capable of so much more — particularly with macro shots. But, in situations where those three factors are not in play, you will struggle to take a good photo. That means that by the time the lazy autofocus captures your scene, your kid will have stopped making that face, your friends will have thrown back their Jäger shots, or your pet will no longer be doing whatever hilarious thing it was doing.

A "good enough" camera isn't good enough

I also don't agree (as some will argue) that a "good enough" camera is acceptable for Google's flagship smartphone, and I don't think the company feels that way either. Yes, the price point is low on this phone, but not low compared with on-contract phones (which the majority of consumers purchase), and nothing else about the Nexus 5 feels cheap. Google intends for this phone to be pitted against the best that Apple has to offer, and I doubt anyone at the company would tell you they’re pleased that the camera doesn’t stand out.

There is a glimmer of hope, however. Representatives from the Android team say that software is to blame for the weak performance, not hardware, and reps tell me that a fix is coming to deal with the issues in the upcoming weeks. I've even seen an early build of the new software, and while it's only a minor improvement — autofocus is a hair faster, but still inconsistent, and picture quality hasn't changed — it's nice to see Google already at work.

Of course, there's no set date for a fix at this point, and I don't know how much the camera can actually be improved through software, but if the Moto X is any kind of example, there might just be a solution to this very disheartening problem.

Update: Google has issued a significant update to the camera software bundle of the Nexus 5 in the form of Android 4.4.1. The update improves upon many of the issues cited in this review, most significantly the camera's ability to focus on subjects consistently and reliably in a variety of lighting and environment settings. To read more about the changes, see our detailed review here.