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HD Camera

HD Camera
Version 1.0

Bottom Line: Avoid

HD Camera by OutmanTech (no website) is yet another “zoom” app. This one offers marginally better results than the in-camera cropping that most “zoom” apps deliver.

The app functions as a camera. The zoom is set using an onscreen slider, rather than pinch-and-zoom. I prefer this method of setting your zoom level and wish more apps offered this as an option.

The app offers up to 4X zoom and higher resolution than most zoom apps. It has a 2:1 resampling algorithm which reduces your image size by 50% at 4X zoom — on a 2G or 3G, you’ll get images as large as 800 x 600 pixels. It’s still better than most zoom apps, but Zoom Lens and Snapture perform full-resolution resampling at all zoom levels. Overall, I think Zoom Lens app with it’s built-in enhancement algorithms produces much better results.

There is a huge bug with this app — an image orientation bug. Images are saved rotated 90° off — wide saved as tall, tall saved as wide. Unless you fix your images in yet another app, the results you get from HD Camera are useless to send from your iPhone.

This is a digital zoom and by nature produces inferior results compared to an optical zoom lens. That said, the results are okay — nothing spectacular, even after correcting the images to their proper orientation.

The app is $1.99 USD in the App Store. For $2, I think version 1.0 is way overpriced. For the money, there are apps that yield better results with none of the bugs.

App Store Link: HD Camera

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