ShiningWorks brought us for Christmas exactly what we weren’t looking for. A way to turn our beautiful iPhone into Vintage plain ol’ point and shoot camera: The G700-1st Soft Camera.
Here’s what you see when you start up the app. First thing you have to do after you start the app is, uh, turn it on.
Once you do that, you’ll see that you’ve got a fully functional point and shoot camera right there inside your iPhone.
The app does have some features that are generally wished for, such as flash (software), zoom, anti-shake, timer, burst mode. You can also set the date and geographic location to appear on the picture itself.
The problem with a zoom feature on an iPhone is that it is digital zoom (no matter what app). You can’t expect great results from that. The flash simply brightens the shot. Anti-shake wasn’t really what I was expecting. It simply gives you an indicator that tells you that you’re moving the camera and won’t take the picture until you keep it still, like Night Camera does. Here I’m shaking the camera violently, sending the strangely high-resolution, multi-color, shake-o-meter into redline for demonstration purposes…
The Gold Member skin on the phone is not the default. I chose it out of a selection of 4 different appearances for the camera:
Once you’ve taken your pictures, you can browse then and apply a number of different effects, like a vignette, Candy, Movie, Vintage, Sepia, etc. It also has some basic sharing functionality.
Now for the Bad news…
Some important limitations are that it only shoots in 800×600 mode on an iPhone 3G and 1024×768 on a 3Gs. For those of you wondering, thats .5 and .8 megapixel vs. the 3.1 Megapixels you get from the regular camera on the iPhone 3Gs. Frankly, this puzzles me.
Taking a picture with this app on my phone took 5 seconds to process (vs a second or two on the standard iPhone Camera. I’m not sure what it is doing for 5 seconds.
Bottom Line
The $2.99 G700 app is a fun toy that does a great job at simulating the appearance of point and shoot camera.
I have three of those already. I like my iPhone camera the way it is.
