Overexposed photos on Pixel 10 XL / Pro / Pro XL

[Nathan AUDVARD]

Hi!

We're getting overexposed photos on at least the Pixel 10 XL / Pro / Pro XL.

Some users start out with correctly exposed photos, then from a certain point (not the same day) the captures become overexposed and stay that way. We've only seen this on Pixel phones, and we couldn't reproduce it on our own Pixels.

I read through this thread https://groups.google.com/a/android.com/g/camerax-developers/c/K59xe88Z5BU?pli=1 that is could come from an HDR+ issue.

Is that explanation still accurate? Is there a better flag than NOISE_REDUCTION_MODE_OFF to disable HDR+ / fix the exposure?

Environment:
- CameraX: 1.5.0
- Android: 36 (confirmed, maybe more)
- Devices: Pixel 10 XL, Pro, Pro XL (confirmed, maybe more)

Thanks!

[Charcoal Chen]

Hi! Thanks for reporting this issue.

The symptom you described is very similar to the previous HDR+ problem mentioned in the other discussion thread. Based on the behavior, this appears to be a device HAL internal implementation issue. Currently, CameraX does not have a direct or good way to handle this on the library side.

As a diagnostic step, you can try setting the NOISE_REDUCTION_MODE_OFF flag via Camera2Interop to confirm whether the issue disappears after changing the setting. Please note that this flag will affect the device's HAL still capture pipeline, so we recommend carefully checking the resulting image quality to determine whether you want to adopt it as a workaround.

If you do choose to use it, you may want to periodically verify and remove the workaround if a newly released ROM build resolves the underlying issue.