Here’s a cool link that’s full of geek and bound to make your brain hurt. A post on EOSHD from last year talks about next generation mobile phone camera lenses by Sony and Omnivision, the current manufacturer of the iPhone’s cameras. With all of the recent talk about who will be manufacturing the camera in the “iPhone 5″, I thought it would be a good time to trot this post out again.
The article describes recent patents for two different technology goes that will greatly improve the experience of shooting with a mobile phone camera, including the iPhone.
Bottom Line: Great color, great saturation, great dynamic range, a decent flash. An awesome mobile phone camera in many ways, but a few first edition flaws.
I’ve had my iPhone 4 for two weeks now. It’s an amazing device and I absolutely love it. It’s nearly as much an improvement over my old iPhone 2G as the 2G was an improvement over my old Motorola RAZR. It’s faster. The new retina display is gorgeous. iOS 4 is a terrific operating system; it runs great on the iPhone 4 and isn’t plagued by the performance issues and slowdowns that many users are experiencing with older iPhones. The battery life is improved over previous iPhones. Even taking into consideration that this is a brand new unit, I often go two days without charging.
The iPhone 4 also has a much-touted, much improved camera. It’s like going from your first, old 2MP digital camera years ago and upgrading to a new PowerShot. The new features and specs take what was once a class of digital lo-fi cameras (the iPhone) and gotten very close to a respectable point-and-shoot camera. You won’t be ditching your DSLR for an iPhone 4 any time soon, but you may be leaving the house a lot more without your PowerShot.
Check the App Store for the great new update of Gorillacam by Joby Inc. The update adds a few great new features to this camera replacement app that we recently reviewed in our Best Free iPhone Camera Replacements article. Best of all, the app is still free.
The version 1.1 update adds anti-shake image stabilization, tap-to-focus for 3GS iPhones, selectable image sizes and a very nice full resolution 4X digital zoom. It’s a great update to an already excellent camera replacement app.
If you don’t already have a camera replacement app, Gorillacam is worth a serious look — even more so after this update.
ProCamera Basic by Daemgen.net is available for free for a limited time — down from $1.99.
ProCamera Basic is an excellent camera replacement. I’ve been using the full-version, ProCamera, as my camera replacement app of choice for the the last couple of revisions. ProCamera Basic is a full-featured camera — anti-shake with three settings, composition gridlines, full-resolution 5X digital zoom, Big Button full-screen shutter, and adjustable timer are just some of the features in Basic. Some of the missing features that the full version has are 3G tap-to-focus, video capabilities and the virtual horizon.
The ProCamera apps have become some of the premier camera replacements in the App Store, becoming the standard to beat for price and features. This is a great chance to grab one of the better camera apps available while it’s free.
My girlfriend and I have a very pleasant Sunday morning coffee ritual. Some days, it involves simply lounging around the bed, reading and sharing news stories from our iPhones. Most of the time, weather permitting, we go out to one of the many Starbucks in our city. My beverage of choice is the Grande Latte with an extra shot. The baristas call it a “triple,” I prefer to call it by its long name, hoping to avoid any confusion.
On this Sunday, we went to a Starbucks that we usually don’t go to. It was near the Apple Store, so we thought we’d multitask. The day started cool and cloudy and went cold and gray from there. The newly placed holiday wreaths swung about in the wind. The sky became more progressively gray, sucking the color out of just about everything. For a moment, it felt like winter in North Texas.
Long before the App Store, Snapture by SnaptureLabs was the premier camera app for jailbroken iPhones. Even back then, Snapture had features that camera apps in The Store are only now catching up to. Of course, being free at the time of the constraints of Apple’s approved APIs probably helped. My friends were jealous of the true digital zoom and the level guide that I was able to use in my camera.
ProCamera by Daemgen.net got a really nice update to version 2.5 today. The update features several significant improvements and adds several new features.
For the first time, ProCamera now has full-res 5X digital zoom, not just in-app cropping! This can be toggled from the app’s settings — I believe this is the only app that gives you the choice. Very nice! Image save speed seems faster than previous versions.
I’ll post my full review of the new version soon. They did a great job on this update! If you’re looking for a camera replacement app and like the features ProCamera lists, the app is rock-solid, well-implemented and worth $2.99 USD. Definitely recommended!
It’s been a while since I reviewed Camera Genius by CodeGoo. Since then, it is on its third big revision and I thought this would be a good opportunity to revisit my review.
Camera Genius 1.7 is the best camera replacement app available in the App Store. It adds great functionality and features to the iPhone’s camera, especially if you have an older 3G or 2G iPhone. It’s powerful yet easy to use. It works on all iPhone models and supports auto-focus on the 3GS. Importantly, all the features in Camera Genius work as advertised.
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.
Apple’s built-in iPhone Camera app is a solid if barebones camera. Point, shoot… that’s it. Very few features. Many other full-featured apps have been created as alternatives to the default camera app. One of the more recent ones, Zoom Photo Camera by Planet Blue Art falls way short.
The feature set is pretty unique and would be pretty good if the app worked. There are onscreen sliders you can use to adjust the brightness and color temperature before you snap your picture. The brightness feature works okay, but will wash out your image if applied too much. An exposure adjustment which also balances the contrast would be an improvement here. There is a good anti-shake option and a variable self timer. These features can be toggled off or on in the app preferences.
The app supports a resolution of up to 2048 x 1536. It does not upsample images to that resolution if you are using an iPhone 2G or 3G and it doesn’t appear to support iPhone 3GS focus in this version.
The “zoom” feature is not a zoom at all, but simply an in-camera crop, giving you an image that’s only 25% of the size you are expecting, in my case 400 x 300 pixel images. This is yet another app which touts itself as adding digital zoom to the iPhone, when in fact, the quality of these “zoomed” images will be substandard for all but the most basic of uses. These images may be fine for Twitter, Facebook or MMS, but the digital zoom feature is unusable for any iPhoneography. That pretty, sharp image in the description on the app store is unrealistic and very misleading. You will not get results that good with this version of Zoom Photo Camera. For a true digital zoom yielding much better results, Zoom Lens by BitWink is turning out to be the standard for digital zoom on iPhone, with full-resolution, in camera digital zoom and full-size output.
I had stability problems with the app. Zoom Photo Camera is one of few third-party apps which allow you to fire off lots of images while caching and auto-saving in the background. Well, sort of…. While saving images, the app crashed on me more often than not, causing me to lose all but the first image shot. Shooting 10 images in succession caused the app to crash for me during saves (every time for me, your mileage may vary), causing me to lose most of my shots. Rebooting my iPhone seemed to help, but not eliminate the problem.
The lack of a quality zoom isn’t a dealbreaker for me — the lack of app stability is and this is why I’ve given the app an “Avoid” rating. I don’t have the time, battery or desire to reboot my phone before using my iPhone’s camera, especially when there are plenty of other camera replacement apps that can do the job without the threat of crashing. Many photo opportunities avail themselves only for a moment and my images are too valuable to me to risk losing during an application crash.
For an iPhone camera replacement app, version 1.0 of Zoom Photo Camera is an unreliable choice unless you like gambling with your photos. There are more reliable apps which will give you better quality images, whether you are a casual photographer or a serious iPhoneographer.
Zoom Photo Camera is normally $1.99 USD in the App Store.
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FTC Disclosure: I am not associated with this or any camera app creator. I paid full price for this app in the App Store.
