Update: Yeah, disregard all of this. See here.
One problem that has plagued a lot of Droid users is a malfunctioning autofocus. Take a close up picture of a barcode, or a high contrast image, or various other photo types, and the autofocus just doesn’t work properly. You can tell the phone has auto-focused when green frame lines are visible in the corners (another way is to view images after you’ve taken them and see if they are, cough, blurry).
A lot of people have complained about the problem, even our own guys over at MobileCrunch: “The main issue is with the auto-focusing system, primarily because it just doesn’t work.” Here’s a video of the problem. More complaints here.
Most users where hoping for a software upgrade in the near future that would fix the problem. But now some users are happily finding another, somewhat lower-tech fix – cleaning the lens with a soft cloth: “This works and sounds crazy. I just read that if you clean the camera lens really good with a soft cloth you will get the green focus. I’ll give anything a try so I did it. My camera now focus’s all the time. Green focus on all my shots. Supposedly there is a little bit of oily film over the lens and when wiped clean it fixes the issue. give it a shot and report here. I can tell you it worked lol…4 shots, all green….”
Everyone on the thread is responding that the “fix” is working (“I just cleaned mine and i got 6 for 6 green shots great find”). A few are saying that the problem went away on its own: “I noticed the camera working before out of nowhere too. Not to say a clean lens isn’t better, but they must’ve done something.”
The software has definitely not been upgraded on the phone. Our guess is those users who suddenly found their camera working properly have simply inserted and removed the phone from their pocket enough times that the thin film on the lens has now been removed.
Does it work for you? Let us know. My Droid never had autofocus problems to begin with.
