The Google Nexus 9 Review
by Joshua Ho & Ryan Smith on February 4, 2015 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Tablets
- HTC
- Project Denver
- Android
- Mobile
- NVIDIA
- Nexus 9
- Lollipop
- Android 5.0
Camera
In the case of tablets, cameras have become increasingly important. While it’s still a bit awkware to take photos and video with a tablet, there is still value to having decent cameras on a tablet. For the front-facing camera, it’s pretty clear that there is a lot of value to be had here as the tablet can be a good tool for video conferencing in lieu of a bulky laptop. The rear camera can also have value, but mostly for taking a photo of a whiteboard or simply when opportunity dictates. To fulfill these duties, the Nexus 9 has been outfitted with a rather standard set of cameras. On the rear, we see an 8MP, 1/4 inch format sensor while the front-facing camera has a 1.6MP, 1/5 inch sensor. I’ve included a table of the full camera specs below in the interest of readability.
| Camera Specifications | |||
| Google Nexus 9 | |||
| Front Camera | 1.6MP | ||
| Front Camera - Sensor | OV9760 (1.75µm, 1/5") |
||
| Front Camera - Focal Length | 2.18mm | ||
| Front Camera - Max Aperture | F/2.18 | ||
| Rear Camera - Sensor | IMX219 (1.12 µm, 1/4") |
||
| Rear Camera - Focal Length | 3.097mm (33mm eff) | ||
| Rear Camera - Max Aperture | F/2.4 | ||
This is pretty much par for the course when it comes to tablets. The optics aren’t particularly remarkable in one way or another, as I haven’t noticed any obvious design issues in any of my test photos, and the focal length isn’t excessively long or short. The UI that comes with Google Camera in general is unremarkable as well. This isn’t a slight against it, but the fact that I don’t have anything significant to complain about is a good step forward from the past when the design of the camera UI was a significant friction point in the user experience.
The one issue that I’ve noticed is that the camera’s auto focus and capture speed are significantly worse than what I saw on the iPad Air 2. Unfortunately, it isn’t really possible to have standardized testing here as a tablet can’t be mounted to a tripod for testing. As there isn’t a custom ISP in the Nexus 9, it’s likely that the Tegra ISP isn’t up to scratch here as I noticed that AF speed is similar to what I saw on the SHIELD Tablet despite differing camera modules.
For the most part, there’s not much else to be said about the camera systems on the Nexus 9 as they aren’t quite as heavily focused as one would see in the smartphone space. All that’s left to do is test the cameras themselves.
In this basic test of daytime photo quality, we can see that HTC has done a reasonably good job of processing the image as noise is generally suppressed without an enormous loss of detail. However, there really isn't a lot of detail to speak of in this sensor. There's also a decent amount of dynamic range as there's detail in the shadows but there's no HDR mode to compensate in cases where there is insufficient dynamic range. HTC continues to cap the base ISO to 100, which seems to be a strange move in this situation as the shutter speed is more than high enough to drive the sensor gain even lower.
In this low light scenario, the Nexus 9 effectively falls flat on its face. With an ISO of 3200 and a shutter speed of 1/12s, there's effectively no detail past the first set of steps. Luminance noise is strong and present throughout the image, and color noise also has a tendency to creep in as well. Given the sheer size of the tablet, it's also hard to stably hold the tablet to take a photo despite the relatively fast 1/12s shutter speed. One should really avoid using this to take photos in low light unless there's no other choice.
In video, detail generally tends to be about the same as what one can find in photos, which means that daytime footage should have decent quality but low light rapidly reduces the quality as the sensor gain must increase. In the case of the Nexus 9, we see that video tops out at 1080p30 maximum with no slow motion available, and that the file is in a .3gp format instead of a standard mp4 that most are familiar with. The video itself is encoded with H.264 baseline at 14 Mbps, which is likely to be below the maximum that the encoder can support. There doesn't appear to be any significant level of stabilization in this case, which is a bit disappointing although not entirely surprising. There is also a lot of focus hunting throughout the video, which is quite distracting.
Overall, it seems that the camera on the Nexus 9 is an acceptable one for a tablet, although this would effectively be unacceptable on a high-end smartphone. The camera itself produces decent output in daytime but really suffers in low light due to the small pixel size, relatively narrow aperture, and small sensor. There are also a lot of issues with consistent and reliable auto focus, as it often takes multiple focus runs to get the camera to focus properly on even high contrast objects. Each focus run takes a significant amount of time as well, which hurts the shooting experience when combined with the somewhat long capture latency. I would avoid using this camera unless it is strictly necessary, although it isn't terrible as a camera for cases such as document scanning.
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dtgoodwin - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
I really appreciate the depth that this article has, however, I wonder if it would have been better to separate the in depth CPU analysis for a separate article. I will probably never remember to come back to the Nexus 9 review if I want to remember a specific detail about that CPU.nevertell - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
Has nVidia exposed that they would provide a static version of the DCO so that app developers would be able to optimize their binaries at compile time ? Or do these optimizations rely on the program state when they are being executed ? From a pure academic point of view, it would be interesting to see the overhead introduced by the DCO when comparing previously optimized code without the DCO running and running the SoC as was intended.Impulses - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
Nice in depth review as always, came a little late for me (I purchased one to gift it, which I ironically haven't done since the birthday is this month) but didn't really change much as far as my decision so it's all good...I think the last remark nails it, had the price point being just a little lower most of the minor QC issues wouldn't have been blown up...
I don't know if $300 for 16GB was feasible (pretty much the price point of the smaller Shield), but $350 certainly was and Amazon was selling it for that much all thru Nov-Dec which is bizarre since Google never discounted it themselves.
I think they should've just done a single $350-400 32GB SKU, saved themselves a lot of trouble and people would've applauded the move (and probably whined for a 64GB but you can't please everyone). Or a combo deal with the keyboard, which HTC was selling at 50% at one point anyway.
Impulses - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
No keyboard review btw?JoshHo - Thursday, February 5, 2015 - link
We did not receive the keyboard folio for review.treecats - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
Where is the comparison to NEXUS 10????Maybe because Nexus 10's battery life is crap after 1 year of use!!!
Please come back review it again when you used it for a year.
treecats - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
My previously holds true for all the Nexus device line I own.I had Nexus 4,
currently have Nexus 5, and Nexus 10. All the Nexus devices I own have bad battery life after 1 year of use.
Google, fix the battery problem.
blzd - Friday, February 6, 2015 - link
That tells me you are mistreating your batteries. You think it's coincidence that it's happening to all your devices? Do you know how easy it is for batteries to degrade when over heating? Do you know every battery is rated for a certain number of charges only?Mostly you want to avoid heat, especially while charging. Gaming while charging? That's killing the battery. GPS navigation while charging? Again, degrading the battery.
Each time you discharge and charge the battery you are using one of it's charge cycles. So if you use the device a lot and charge it multiple times a day you will notice degradation after a year. This is not unique to Google devices.
grave00 - Sunday, February 8, 2015 - link
I don't think you have the latest info on how battery charging vs battery life works.hstewartanand - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
Even though I personal have 6 tablets ( 2 iPads, 2 Windows 8.1 and 2 android ) and as developer I find them technically inferior to Actual PC - except for Windows 8.1 Surface Pro.I recently purchase an Lenovo y50 with i7 4700 - because I desired AVX 2 video processing. To me ARM based platforms will never replace PC devices for certain applications - like Video processing and 3d graphics work.
I am big fan of Nvidia GPU's but don't care much for ARM cpus - I do like the completion that it given to Intel to produce low power CPU's for this market
What I really like to see is a true technical bench mark that compare the true power of cpus from ARM and Intel and rank them. This includes using extended instructions like AVX 2 on Intel cpus.
Compared this with equivalent configured Nvidia GPU on Intel CPU - and I would say ARM has a very long way to go.
But a lot depends on what you doing with the device. I am currently typing this on a 4+ year old Macbook Air - because it easy to do it and convenient. My other Windows 8.1 ( Lenovo 2 Mix 8 - Intel Adam Baytrail ) has roughly the same speed - but Macbook AIR is more convenient. My primary tablet is the Apple Mini with Retina screen, it is also convent for email and amazon and small stuff.
The problem with some of bench marks - is that they maybe optimized for one platform more than another and dependent on OS components which may very between OS environments. So ideal the tests need to native compile for cpu / gpu combination and take advantage of hardware. I don't believe such a benchmark exists. Probably the best way to do this get developers interested in platforms to come up with contest for best score and have code open source - so no cheating. It would be interesting to see ranking of machines from tablets, phones, laptop and even high performance xeon machines. I also have an 8+ Year old dual Xeon 5160 Nvidia GTX 640 (best I can get on this old machine ) and I would bet it will blow away any of this ARM based tablets. Performance wise it a little less but close to my Lenovo y50 - if not doing VIDEO processing because of AVX 2 is such significant improvement.
In summary it really hard to compare performance of ARM vs Intel machines. But this review had some technical information that brought me back to my older days when writing assembly code on OS - PC-MOS/386