A quick quality fix for a mobile phone camera

I recently switched to a HTC Titan phone and was shocked at the horrible pictures the built in camera produces. But the fix is quick.

The first picture I took with this phone was from a damping pot of food. When I saw the fuzzy result, I concluded the steam from the food had blurred the picture and gave it no further tought. But when I noticed this same foggy effect on subsequent pictures I started to investigate what was going on.


My pictures looked a lot like those of the famous photographer David Hamilton, apart from the subject of course. Knowing that he achieved this effect by smearing stuff on his lenses led me to cleaning the lens surface. That's when I noticed that the back cover of this phone contains an additional piece of plastic that is put in front of the actual lens. This piece is smudgy and quite impossible to keep clean.
Below you see two pictures with and without the back cover on, the difference is obvious:


On the picture of the cover you can easily see how it looks smudged. Because of the large depth of field of these small size cmos sensors and the relative large distance from the lens the problem from dirt on the plastic piece is a lot worse then dirt on the actual lens.

So my fix is simple: I took a drill bit and drilled out a hole the size of the transparent area in the plastic piece. This gives me clear pictures again!