We recently reviewed the free app Camera Plus by Global Delight and named it as one of the best free iPhone camera replacement apps. Hopefully, you like the free app so much, you buy Camera Plus Pro with several additional features. If you’ve been on the fence about buying the app, consider that one very cool new feature in the next major upgrade is video for all iPhones, including older ones. And from a sample clip released this week, it looks like the quality of that video is pretty decent for a phone cam.
Here’s a clip from Global Delight’s YouTube Channel, taken recently, showing the video capabilities of the beta:
As the clip shows, the video is smooth and the frame rate seems better than most of the 3rd-party video recording apps currently available. It appears to offer those with older iPhones a superior alternative if they want to record video on those devices. Glyn Evans on iPhoneography.com recently wrote an excellent article, “Shooting Video on the iPhone 2G/3G.” In it, he notes that nearly all of the currently available video recorders for older, non-3GS iPhones record at 15 frames-per-second or lower, which means that the picture will look choppy when played back. It looks to me like Camera Plus Pro 2.0 will have video of at least that, possibly higher. To my eye, the playback of the beta clip was smoother than any of the other alternatives currently available.
Camera Plus Pro currently is a very good camera replacement app. It’s rock-solid and full-featured. It has some very nice built-in features, such as good black & white conversion, 3GS tap-to-focus support, and in-app cropping. It has exposure enhancement (simulated flash) with three settings. The “flash” uses a good algorithm and produces very good results which are better than many of the standalone flash apps in the store. The pro version also includes watermarking, date and time stamp, a built-in quick roll with photo privacy lock, geo-tagging and photo sharing from within the app. The photo sharing is nicely done. Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and email are all accessible from one screen in the app’s Quick Roll. CP Pro has a slider which allows you to adjust for image size and quality when uploading — a nice feature when you don’t need to upload or email full-size images.
Camera Plus Pro has a basic set of image editing tools inside its Quick Roll, including brightness, contrast, sharpness, tint, crop and rotate. I couldn’t find a straighten feature that would allow me to turn the image in small increments, which is always a handy tool to have.
The tool set won’t replace a full-blown image editor like Photogene or PhotoForge, but it’s usable for many quick tweaks before uploading an image to Facebook, Picasa, or Twitter.
Like its free sibling, the app has a 4X zoom, which is really just in-app cropping — your zoomed images will be pretty small and mostly unusable at higher magnifications, but using the zoom at 2x or less should get you images that will work for MMS, Facebook or Twitter.
Camera Plus Pro won’t replace an arsenal of camera apps, image editors and effects processors, but even at the current version, 1.3, it’s a very good all-in-one camera app if you like the convenience of using one good swiss army app with a solid toolset. I found the limitations of some of the built-in tools and lack of a full-res digital zoom frustrating for my everyday use, but overall Camera Plus Pro 1.3 is a very good camera replacement to easily shoot, tweak, and crop your photos and snapshots as wells as easy uploading and sharing photos and snapshots.
I’m very excited about the video capabilities of the forthcoming update! It will be interesting to see how the video is implemented in the update — what frame size and aspect ratios it supports, frame rate, etc. I’ll revisit the app again when the update is released. Camera Plus Pro is definitely an app to watch.
Camera Plus Pro version 1.3 is $1.99 USD.
App Store link: Camera Plus Pro
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