One of the things that was surprising to many people was the simplicity of the camera in T-Mobile’s G1
.
The Android platform always seemed ideal for a really feature-rich
camera, which isn’t what the G1 shipped with. Even the camera in the
Cupcake OS release is a little weak.
.
The Android platform always seemed ideal for a really feature-rich
camera, which isn’t what the G1 shipped with. Even the camera in the
Cupcake OS release is a little weak.
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
