Review: OXCamera - A Great Multiple Exposure Camera for iPhone

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OXCamera
Version 1.0
Price: $1.99 USD

Bottom Line: A great multiple exposure camera, despite the unpronounceable name….

OXCamera by Chime & Beeper Software is an undiscovered gem of an app because there’s no way to easily tell other iPhoneographers about it. It’s not “o” and “x”. Most browsers won’t even render the characters correctly. How do you pronounce the name? Ox Camera? Mul Eks? Omicron Chi Camera? The Artist Formerly Known as App? The title comes with a pronunciation guide (see photo), but even that doesn’t render correctly in Firefox.

Regardless of how you pronounce the name of the app, OXCamera is a surprisingly good multiple exposure camera for the iPhone. It’s a great tool to use for experimenting with multiple exposure photography on an iPhone.

Different than Slow Shutter Cam which mimics long exposure times, OXCamera is a multiple exposure camera. It can take as few as 1 exposure and as many as 128. It combines the exposures together and calculates an average so that the images look properly exposed. Elements that are unique to each exposure appear ghosted in the final, combined image. Another byproduct of combining multiple exposures is that it’s possible to greatly improve clarity, smooth color, and significantly reduce noise in low light images.

Multiple Exposure iPhoneography

The app has both Auto and Manual modes, with an easily accessible switch on the main screen. In Auto mode, there are three user-selectable shutter delay intervals, which worked out to 4-5 seconds, 5 seconds and 9 seconds on my 2G. I suspect this is due to RAM and CPU limitations of my 2G. There is a setting which provides a burst mode of 8 shots, which triggered in 1 second intervals on my 2G. Manual mode can shoot up to 255 images and generates a handy transparent preview to help align your next exposure.

The app can only be used as a camera. It’s not possible to load images from your photo library. The app is rock solid. It never crashed on me, even during my 70 exposure test. Even more impressive is that output is a full resolution 1200×1600 pixels on my 2G.

Shooting multiple exposures in Auto mode is easy. Simply choose your settings, aim, shoot and the camera does the rest. There’s even a progress bar as the camera shoots.

Manual mode allows you to do some really cool overlays and double exposures. Of the two modes, Manual is probably the least dependent on a tripod to produce good results.

Although you can take 128 exposures or more when shooting multiple exposures for a ghost effect, you really shouldn’t. I found I got the best results when using 4 exposures or less. Any more and the ghost effect simply became too faint.

Using OXCamera for Low-light iPhoneography

In addition to multiple exposure effects, OXCamera also improves the quality of low-light images. In my test images, OXCamera did an excellent job enhancing the sharpness and clarity as well as reducing the noise of my low-light exposures. It doesn’t brighten the overall image, but it does give you a much higher quality photograph to work with. Image quality improves with a higher number of exposures. Even a low setting like 4x produced results that were noticeably less noisy than my reference image. The 70x image is significantly sharper and noise-free, but also took several minutes to photograph.

(See samples in the gallery below)

Besides the excellent ClearCam, which was only for jailbroken iPhones and is sadly no longer available, I haven’t seen any app produce results this clear and noise-free in low-light conditions. Unlike ClearCam, however, OXCamera doesn’t align exposures so you will need a tripod such as Joby’s Gorilla Mobile or the iPhone Tripod Holder to take advantage of OXCamera’s excellent low-light capabilities.

I have a few minor issues with OXCamera. The app is understandably slow. The more exposures it shoots, the longer it takes to produce the final image. That said, for all of the compositing, calculating and averaging it does under the hood, OXCamera works amazingly fast at what it does. It’s not the app that’s slow, it’s the process. My biggest issue with the app are the placement of the Settings and Shutter Release buttons. They are very close to the exposure slider and it’s easy to accidentally change the exposures setting when trying to change the app’s prefs or when taking a photo. The exposure slider was a little loose and difficult to be precise with my big fingers.

Still, OXCamera is a unique app that I like a lot. There are other multiple exposure cameras in the App Store, but none I’ve found are as powerful as this one while saving at full-resolution. Most of the other multiple exposure apps available don’t save in high-resolution. While a tripod is recommended to get best results, you certainly don’t need one. OXCamera is one of the hidden gems in the App Store. For creating multiple exposure photography on the iPhone, I haven’t found a better app. I recommend it.