Since I’ve bought the Teracube 2e from the e.OS shop, the picture quality was way to poor, even for a cheap smartphone.
Do other users encounter the same quality issue?
And do you have any ideas on how to fix this?
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I’ve seen this as well, up through /e/OS 1.6 on the Teracube 2e 2021 (Emerald); haven’t tested photos on 1.7 yet.
I never contacted Teracube support because it takes a flawless picture every once in a while so I believed it couldn’t be a bad lens. The picture quality is generally, as the OP suggests, like the original cheap smartphones which had single lenses. The variation in picture quality based on field depth suggests it can’t focus the lens pair properly (or at all).
The default Android camera app allows focus targeting based on the part of the picture you select. The white focus box overlay turns green when it thinks you’re focused on the part you’ve selected… then you take the picture & you can see that you weren’t. If there is a rangefinder in this camera system, maybe that’s the part that can’t be controlled by the camera app.
Again as the OP suggests, Teracube never would have released hardware with a camera this bad. I read a review of the Teracube before buying, which was bad mostly because of the camera… but only because of its low resolution: it was an older review (probably about the 2020 phone) which means maybe only the newer (2021) models are affected.
Because this appears to be a software problem, I’ve been hoping a camera app perhaps providing some supplementary driver software for the camera, or using the camera API differently, would fix it. I also haven’t checked the /e/OS issue queue if there is one. Maybe one of the more experienced users on the Forum could tell us how to follow up on both these issues.
And of course if the Teracube itself has a design flaw in the camera, it would be good to confirm this officially before we try to fix the problem in software.
This contradicts having a degoogled phone, but a lot of people with low quality cameras on their phone install the Google Pixel phone app. I haven’t tried this, but apparently it can turn a bad camera into a decent camera. People with degoogled phones tend turn off the permissions to internet for the app because it’s Google. Here’s an article talking about it.
https://www.makeuseof.com/get-google-camera-on-any-android-phone/
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It’s probably not the phone hardware. I guess it’s OpenCamera. Try at last FreeDCam (from F-Droid) or a GCam port to check the responsibility for your problem.
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Thank you.
GCam does not seem to be available and FreeDCam delivers the same poor quality as all other apps 
FreeDCam needs configuration like every other camera app. And to set the options right takes some time and needs a lot of tests under different conditions. FreeDCam options are hard to find. You must swipe once to the right, if you don’t find this by accident you’ll never know it. On the right side of the table you find some options related to the quality, especially noise reduction. Also have a look at the JPEG compression level (on the left), I use 96% there. - Indeed I take FreeDCam currently as my default camera app. It’s not that bad.
You can find GCam ports here and must sideload them (install without App store). Be aware that these ports may not run on every device. Try it. One major issue with these GCam ports is that they (at least those ones I tried) can’t use the SD card.
BTW: also the stock OpenCamera app has a lot of options and you can change many things. Especially you can switch on noise reduction which is normally off. That’s why the pictures become grainy in many cases. But using OpenCamera it remains indeed difficult to get proper pictures whatever you configure.
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