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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AbRASiON - Thursday, February 5, 2015 - link
LCD, not OLED? Blacks being grey? Nope :/blzd - Friday, February 6, 2015 - link
I'd actually rather grey blacks then the loss of detail in black areas. Pure black is nice, but not when it comes at the expense of shadow details.techn0mage - Thursday, February 5, 2015 - link
I agree that late is better than never. Rather than discuss things that can't be changed, I felt the following points were worth raising:Is there any Nexus 6 data in the benchmark charts? I didn't see any. The N6 and N9 were released roughly around the same point in time, and like the N5 and N7 they are high-profile devices in the Android landscape, so it would have been nice to have them in the charts to make comparisons. Please correct me if I've overlooked anything.
The Denver deep dive, while certainly relevant to Nexus 9 and good AT content on any day, was probably a good candidate for having its own article. I believe it is fair to say the Denver content is -less- time sensitive than the overall review. Hopefully the review was not held back by the decision to include the "DDD" content - and to be clear right now I have no reason to believe it was.
WndlB - Thursday, February 5, 2015 - link
Particularly in this kind of full-dress review of high-end devices, could you start covering the delivered sound, the DAC chips and headphone jack?Via A-B comparisons, I'm finding some real differences and, as people go to more high-quuality audiio streams (plus video sound), this is becoming a differentiator of significance. Thanks.
JoshHo - Tuesday, February 10, 2015 - link
We could do subjective opinion, but properly testing 3.5mm output requires significant investment in test equipment.name99 - Thursday, February 5, 2015 - link
I know this isn't exactly a Nexus9 questions, but how can your battery life results for iPad Air2 be so inconsistent?We are given 10.18 hrs for "display a white image" and 13.63 hrs for "display video". For an OLED display this is possible, but not for a LED-backlit display unless you are running the video at a "base-level" brightness of much lower than the 200 nits of the "display a white image", and what's the point of that? Surely the relevance of the "display a white image" is to show how long the display+battery lasts under normal usage conditions, not when being used as a flashlight?
My point is --- I am guessing that the "display a white image" test utilizes some app that prevents the screen from going black. Do you have confidence that that app (and in particular whatever tickling of the OS that is done to prevent sleep) is doing this in the energy optimal way, on both iOS and Android?
JoshHo - Tuesday, February 10, 2015 - link
I don't believe there was any real background CPU usage. To my knowledge the difference is that Apple enables dynamic contrast in movies.easp - Thursday, February 5, 2015 - link
"The successor to the Nexus 7 was even more incredible, as it pushed hardware that was equal to or better than most tablets on the market at a lower price. However, as with most of these low cost Nexus devices not everything was perfect as corners still had to be cut in order to hit these low price points."So, hardware that was equal or better, except it wasn't? This is a situation where being more specific would help. My guess, when you said equal or better you were referring to certain specifications, certain obvious specifications like core count, RAM, and maybe screen resolution?
mkygod - Friday, February 6, 2015 - link
Owned a Nexus 9 for almost 3 months. I purchased three actually to see if backlight bleed was any better, but nope; so I ended up returning them a couple weeks ago. The bleeding was pretty bad; worse than any LCD device i've ever used and definitely worse than the Nexus 5 and Nexus 7. And it would've been okay if it had uniform bleeding like the Nexus 5, but it had blotches of bright spots all along the edges which is even more distracting. I found the reflectivity with the screen a non-factor in my exclusively indoor use. It's a shame because the Nexus 9 is an otherwise damn good tablet. What's also disappointing, as the review points out, is if you want a high-end tablet around this size, your only options are the 9 and the Tab S. It seems like a lot of really good Android tablets are in the 8" size, such as the Shield and new Dell Venue, with more manufacturers on the horizon making tablets in this size.MartinT - Friday, February 6, 2015 - link
I wonder what level of load penalty is incurred by having to ship in optimized code from main memory. Is there any prefetching going on to preposition code segments in lower level caches ahead of being called?