Preview and photos are unfocused

@jon could you attach the camera logs from the camera that is in this state

there seems to be two issues:
One is focus-mode getting stacked in "auto" mode and not returning back to "continuous-picture" mode.
This could be reproduced by letting camera settle in "continuous-picture" mode, then tasking camera away and back, camera is restarted in auto mode. Not sure what is best way to reproduce but I was moving camera away while it was trying to refocus at this point and it'd get stacked in "auto" mode and never return to "continuous-picture" mode. Problem can be removed by simply tapping to screen to few objects to initialise auto focus to object and then moving camera around. It will usually go back to "continuous-picture" mode.

Second bug which is described here is when auto detection of macro mode fails to recognise when macro mode should be switched off. camera will still focus correctly when doing closeups but will fail to focus to faraway pictures.
I did not find consistent way to reproduce this or how to recover from that state. Sometimes tasking camera away and then resuming after some time does restores right state.
How to get phone in that state is also not reliable, but at least once I got camera to that state by simply focusing (with tab) to close up objects and then trying far away object, and camera would be in "macro" mode and no matter what would not focus to infinity.

To observe focus_mode do following:
$ adb shell
$ sudo /system/bin/logcat | grep "focus-mode"
Tapping on the screen switched focus-mode to "auto" focus to defined coordinates
When moving phone around, phone should default to "focus-mode=continuous-picture"
This is not always done when resuming camera app.
Again not same issue as one reported by John when phone would never focus and be stacked in "macro" mode.
!! Macro here does not mean "focus-mode=macro"

We have checked in android, and the behaviour when using the rear camera is correct.
Please, take notice that when using the front camera. there is not option of focusing after pressing the screen, so the animation that appears, in this case, should disappear.
Hope this can help you with this bug.

Bugs reported in comments here but unrelated to original bugs have been reported separately:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/camera-app/+bug/1441613
https://bugs.launchpad.net/camera-app/+bug/1441614

This is still a very critical bug. It also affects the Meizu MX4 Ubuntu Edition.

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-MQUVuIN87A8/VYqd1t8iJsI/AAAAAAAAWps/O-5C1yN9t84/s400/image20150624_145936724.jpg
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-4ra2YTynWWM/VYqd1sKd87I/AAAAAAAAWpw/0KZkLOmDKds/s400/image20150624_150055214.jpg

http://www.webupd8.org/2015/06/quick-meizu-mx4-ubuntu-edition-review.html

I noticed that when I have the camera-app opened and then lock and unlock the krillin, the camera is not doing auto focus any more as it was doing that few builds ago.

On the MX4 the preview is well focused but when the shutter button is pressed there is a wipe animation on screen and the image becomes out of focus. It seems as if the image is post processed reducing the quality and focus. This device has one of the best image sensors available but repeatably produces poorimages. Is there any information or logs that can be provided to validate this behavior?