Filed under: Software, iPhone, First Look, App Review
First Look: Camera Zoom for iPhone
The iPhone's built-in camera is a prime target for improvements. We've seen iPhone cases with built-in wide-angle lenses, iPhone cases with zoom lenses, and a plethora of apps to manipulate photos. Camera Zoom (click opens iTunes) is a new US$0.99 app from KendiTech that provides a 4x digital zoom for your iPhone camera.
Camera Zoom displays a preview in real time, just like the regular camera app. You use a slider to adjust the level of zoom. After taking the photo, Camera Zoom tweaks it for the best possible quality.
For those of us with "real" digital cameras, the ability to zoom the iPhone's camera is nice. However, the picture quality of a digital zoom is never as good as you'll get with an optical zoom lens. As you can see with the example photos above, the zoomed image tends to be grainy. This is particularly true in low-light conditions. If you can put up with the degraded picture quality, Camera Zoom is an inexpensive way to add zoom capabilities to your iPhone.
I'm surprised that Apple approved this app, since the icon is titled "Camera" just like the real Camera app, and it duplicates the functionality of the Photos app as well. The latter isn't done very well, since you can't flick the screen to move between pictures in the camera roll.
This is version 1.0 of this app, however, and it's a good start to what could be an easy-to-use photo manipulation tool for the iPhone platform.
For those of us with "real" digital cameras, the ability to zoom the iPhone's camera is nice. However, the picture quality of a digital zoom is never as good as you'll get with an optical zoom lens. As you can see with the example photos above, the zoomed image tends to be grainy. This is particularly true in low-light conditions. If you can put up with the degraded picture quality, Camera Zoom is an inexpensive way to add zoom capabilities to your iPhone.
I'm surprised that Apple approved this app, since the icon is titled "Camera" just like the real Camera app, and it duplicates the functionality of the Photos app as well. The latter isn't done very well, since you can't flick the screen to move between pictures in the camera roll.
This is version 1.0 of this app, however, and it's a good start to what could be an easy-to-use photo manipulation tool for the iPhone platform.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Charlie said 5:13PM on 4-18-2009
Or you could just crop with iphoto, photoshop, or some other photo editing software. It is the same thing, all it is doing is cropping and blowing up the image, hence the graininess. The new iphone needs to have optical zoom and an auto focus lens.
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Jacques Lema said 6:00PM on 4-18-2009
Digital zoom... also known as software interpolation, or in other words, stretching the existing pixels and adding averaged pixels in between... also known as pretty much useless.
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Greg said 6:14PM on 4-18-2009
Yeah, it's really stupid to do digital zoom when you can just get more information by taking a non-zoomed photo in the regular camera, and then just crop it later.
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Drew said 7:22PM on 4-18-2009
Or you could just take a picture, then view it in photo on iPhone and zoom in and take a screenshot.
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jollyllama said 8:12PM on 4-18-2009
Okay, the fact that some people take digital "zoom" into account when it's advertised on a camera's box is bad enough, but paying extra (even a buck) for digital "zoom" is just incredibly stupid. Honestly, give that dollar to charity, buy a candy bar, anything but this.
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sam said 8:21PM on 4-18-2009
Enhance ... enhance ... enhance ...
solve the crime.
Unfortunately digital zoom doesn't do that in the real world.
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kompakter said 9:34PM on 4-18-2009
Ha! That always cracks me up on TV shows.
Neg said 6:08AM on 4-19-2009
Wasn't that parodied in something?
sam said 12:11PM on 4-19-2009
The guy in 30 rock asked tech support to "enhance" an image for him to find out what was inside a box. Maybe that's what you're thinking of.
Neg said 9:31PM on 4-18-2009
DIGITAL ZOOM IS NOT ZOOM!
All it does is crop a portion of the picture out - you do better to just take it at 0 "zoom" and crop it yourself later - far more flexible.
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oliver hart said 10:36PM on 4-18-2009
i hate being that guy, but this has been available to jailbreakers forever. i used to have snapture and yes the "zoom" is awful.
some of those japanese add on lenses are actually kind of neat. the demos make them look like they actually are worth using, even if the iPhones camera isnt.
i hate the iPhones camera, it sucks plain and simple, but having the geo-tagging function makes it worth while.
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Steven said 12:12AM on 4-19-2009
As others have said, digital zoom is utterly useless. "Digital zoom" is a misnomer, as it should be called "real time cropping".
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wildwestdev@gmail.com said 3:31AM on 4-19-2009
ATTENTION!
The iPhone SDK Agreement section 3.3.1 states:
"3.3.1 Applications may only use Published APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any unpublished or private APIs. "
There is no documentation for PLCameraView nor it's custom subclasses (PLImageTile, PLRotationView, PLImageScroller, PLImageView, PLCropOverlay, PLCropLCDLayer, TPBottomDualButtonBar, TPPushButton and TPCameraPushButton) in the iPhone SDK.
Clearly, Apple must remove this app from the AppStore to play by the same rules with all developers.
Otherwise, given this unequal attitude and declining AppStore profits, it will be hard to attract more developers for MacOS/iPhone.
Serious developers will think twice before "jumping on the wagon" of this wild west iPhone development.
Apple, remove this renegade app from the AppStore!
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smak said 4:04PM on 4-20-2009
jesus, crybaby, take it easy!
moorsh said 6:04PM on 4-20-2009
It is very reasonable comment - AFAIK developers are not allowed to use anything except standard image picker according to iPhone SDK agreement. But this app uses undocumented features and thus violates iPhone SDK agreement.
Am I wrong or Apple is now OK with allowing some developers to violate SDK agreement?
"everyone is equal but some are more equal than others" - what a hypocrisy, Apple.
alejandra said 10:09PM on 6-28-2009
seems like this app doesnt work anymore after upgrading to the new OS.
I have tried uninstalling it and re installing. It just doesnt work. ...
anybody else experienced this?
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