One of the things that was surprising to many people was the simplicity of the camera in T-Mobile’s G1
Camera Pro is an app that replaces the built-in camera app that adds an incredible number of really useful features. The first is zoom. Camera Pro offers a sliding zoom level. The app uses digital zoom. With digital zoom, the camera doesn’t physically zoom. It crops the image to include only the image area included on the LCD. When zooming in, the camera actually crops a lower resolution image from the overall image that is seen by the camera. This process is seamless to the user, so appears to be a zoom function. In spite of its potential resolution problems, this zoom feature is outstanding, fast, and a very welcome addition to the G1.
The second higher end function is white balance. White balance adjusts for the varying color temperatures of different types of light. Incorrectly set white balance is the reason that many photographs taken under incandescent lights look yellow and others under fluorescent lights look blue. Although Auto is quite good, in some cases you may want to set manual white balance. Camera Pro supports white balance for Incandescent, Fluorescent, Daylight, Cloudy, Twilight and Shade.
Camera Pro also offers a number of compositional aids. Compositional aids are: Crosshairs, Circle, Golden Ratio, and a very cool function that uses the G1s accelerometer to correctly photograph straight horizons.
Although many of the filters are extreme, and as a result of limited usefulness, Camera Pro has a number of filters. The most useful ones are Mono and Sepia. In addition to these two filters, the following filters are supplied: Negative, Solarize, Pastel, Mosaic, Posterize, Whiteboard, Blackboard and Aqua.
Camera Pro can be set to replace the default camera app. It supports a number of other useful functions, like default image size and JPG quality. The default white balance and default filter can also be set from the app settings.
Camera Pro is a reasonable $1.99 in the Android Market and is a very good, very capable replacement for the default camera app.
A full list of features includes:
- Digital Zoom(up to 4x)
- Effect filters(b/w, sepia, aqua,…)
- Whitebalance
- Grid lines (using acceleroemeters, golden ration,…)
- Stability, autofocus
- Just tap screen for a snap shot
- Sending photo via email/MMS
Gallery
Version: 1.1
Developed By: Swiss Codemonkeys
Price: €1.49 ($2.08)
Filesize: 111KB
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Christopher Earle
Christopher Earle has been working as a freelance writer since 1987. He currently lives in the Denver, Colorado area with his wife, son, and their two cats. He has been a fan of open source software for many years.
13 Comments
the only feature I really want in a camera app is reasonable speed.
snapfoto, the stock app…both of them take 20 seconds to start up, and then another 10 seconds to take a picture. kind of defeats the purpose for about half of the photos you try to take…
does this app handle this better?
@ESPOO: I completely agree with you. The camera startup time is a huge disincentive to take photos.
snapphoto appears to offer more features on balance, though it’s nice camera pro offers digital zoom like the default cam app, however snapphoto is friendlier in tone; pro is an obnoxious name and impossible to apply to the base cam’s quality in today’s android devices.
neither offers the ability to take a continuous sequence of photos every X seconds, or according to movement, basic features on other devices.
Unfortunately, you can do all these things and more with the stock HTC Magic Camera app, available to G1 users and Google Ion/Magic/Sapphire users with modified firmwares.
Yeah
Runnin a g1 with ion firmware , the stock camera is far better than stock g1 , however did use the camera pro app , and proved fit for its purpose
SnapPhoto is better. i used this and uninstalled.
This article has completely missed the fact that it was a different camera app that did zoom first on Android – Camera Zoom. Camera Zoom also has some pretty cool shutter animation effects which are skinnable and now has custom borders too.
Startup times are very fast.
I use SnapPhoto Pro and it works great for me and has all these features. just no Zoom. but id rather have no zoom than a fake one.
Snapphoto is better IMO as well. I can really be seen that it has been around since day one, because it is constantly improving. It’s nice to have new features like zoom, but frankly, zoom sucks and gives crappy pictures. Snapphoto’s quality lies in the fact that it aims to make good pictures instead of making an app for people to play around with (no one will actually want to use the zoom for example).
Snapphoto ftw!
Thank you very much for writing this great review about our Camera Pro app!
We recently released a new version with new features such as brightness / contrast control and color balance.
Thanks,
Swiss Codemonkey Team
While trying out this app, I tried to switch from a negative to solarize photo effect and this app froze up my phone so completely, I had to remove the battery to be able to reboot it.
It did some nice, fast test shots, but this ability to totally lock up my phone was not a nice feature.
It is good to see the develpers of the application commenting on this review. It shows that they are trying to see what people want and make the changes needed.
I like that. I will check it out as I like the camera app the LEAST of anything currently.