Hi, I’m looking for a new — second hand — phone and considering the switch from my current iPhone e Android. Ideally something that allow me to install an alternative OS like Murena/LineageOS/GrapheneOS and I’m curious to know your experience. I’m not looking for a great camera, but Ideally I’d like to get a DNG or RAW format that I can develop in darktable. My current phone is an iPhone 12 Pro, and I can get a DNG with Halide. I’m thinking to swtich to a Pixel 8 but not sure if these model allows the output in RAW/DNG format. Thanks for any suggestions!
iirc opencamera on android can do raws too. and if you want long term OS support - which should be your main criteria: pixel 9a or a recent used pixel.
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thank, didn’t know about open camera, I’ll check it out. It will be ok a second hand phone, probably the 8 is ok for me, but not sure what is the difference between 8/8a or 9/9a… still investigating 
I have the 8…it lacks some of the controls of the 8 Pro and cant save the higher MP raw…The thing with pixel phones esp without optical zoom and maybe others now is if you zoom in since the raw is computational it will be or can be a very small file…if you do the max zoom you get a digitally cropped file that might only be 900KB… My old Lumia didn’t do the computational stuff so the jpg was a digital crop when you zoomed but it would save the whole sensor data as the raw DNG… so you could recompose or at least have the a full copy of the raw data…
Open camera might let you do that. The DNG from it as I see it are essentially a TIFF in the DNG container…they are about 23 mb if I recall on my phone… They used to have very weird wb and some weird color casts when using the app on my pixel 3a but I have not used it much since I got the pixel 8… I should check it out…honestly the jpg are for the most part so good I gave up or rarely try to develop the raw files…I do capture both just in case as for sure sometime you can get really weird artifacts in the jpg when the “magic” goes wrong and then sometimes using the raw you can salvage a better version…
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GCam (a port/hack if Google Camera) is available for many phones and supports DNG output. The DNG won’t have all the multi-frame processing goodness that the JPG has, though.
Get a fair phone
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thanks @kofa will check Gcam as well.
Thanks for suggesting, fairphone is something I’m considering, but so far I’m tempted by Graphene OS that is only supported on Pixel hardware.
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Lineage is running well on the fair phone.
Fair…enough!
You could get a 2nd-hand Pixel, probably a lesser ‘evil’ than any new phone.
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That is the plan! Always second hand
I’m looking seriously at that for my next phone as part of my efforts to de-Googlify myself. Do you have one?
Yes I have the fairphone 4.
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Sony has the Xperia Open device program:
there you can find different possibilities as well.
I’m using at the moment a Sony Xperia 10 III with Sailfish on it as my daily driver. A Xperia 10 V has as well already Sailfish on it but is not yet ready for being a daily driver. You can as well flash LineageOS on the Sonys.
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How is the camera? And did you buy it directly from their website? I don’t believe there are any N.American resellers…
The camera is OK, better than my last phone, one plus 9, but not amazing. I just use the default lineage OS camera app, which I don’t think does anything fancy. I don’t rely on the camera for anything serious tho.
You can snag one from here, I think Murena Fairphone 4
More importantly for me, it still has a number of years of support, you can change the battery, it has an SD card slot. No headphone jack tho. Over all it isn’t the most svelte phone, but it runs well still, and I love that I can get parts for it.
I am not a demanding phone user tho.
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“This product is not available for your country”
We have such a crappy selection of phones here in Canada. You can generally import them and get them to work, but it’s never straightforward. It’s just Apple, Samsung and Google Pixel really.
Oh… They list Canada in there so I just assumed. Sorry!
No problem. Looks like they do sell some models to Canada, but not that one.