Samsung Galaxy I7500 :: Camera - Couldn't Take Any Good Shots At All

A few weeks back, when I was considering to switch to Galaxo or not, we had a thread here mentioning an odd issue,

Every 3rd picture taken with the camera app would be bad (or just a dud).

At the time, I couldn't reproduce the issue and it didn't bother me. But, just today afternoon (and a bit early in the week), I encountered something similar - every other picture had a 50% chance of being bad (just blank). It got to the point that the camera was just un-usable. I spent a good bit of time investigating this and I think I have an explanation. But first, let me walk you through what I did.

By default, I keep my camera to take 5 Megapixel shots at "super fine" setting. With that, I couldn't take any good shots AT ALL. I reduced it to 1M and "normal" setting. Things were a bit better, in that now only every other shot was bad. But, at least I was able to use the camera.

I use 3 desktop screens filled with widgets. I disabled most of my widgets and reduced the number of screens to 2. (I'm running Drakaz's darksense theme for Galaxo 1.6.3 ). With this, the camera was MUCH better. In fact, I could take 5 shots continuously without any problems (testing at home).

In some ways, it looks like I was stretching the limits of my i7500 a bit too much and so, the camera just didn't work right, but I can live with fewer screens and fewer widgets.

I miss the Handcent SMS widget, but from what I observed, its too resource-intensive for my needs. The only widgets I use now are from "Jorte" , the organizer app (really good too!) and "SMS Im Away".

So, for those of you who need the camera in working order, consider disabling a few screens and widgets.