App Review: Plastiq Camera

16 Mar 2010

App Review: Plastiq Camera

Price: $1.99
Website: plastiqcamera.com

You can't help but notice that icon. It may not be exactly the same typeface, and red circles on white backgrounds are everywhere if you look hard enough, but it captures the spirit of the Leica logo. And what can a photo app addict do in the face of such a play for his $1.99 but buy it?

Once it's sitting on your home screen, however, Plastiq Camera is not really a Leica anything. Well, the name should have told you as much. This is a toy camera simulator with a full-screen viewfinder – as opposed to a back-of-camera view such as the ones used by Hipstamatic (also $1.99) and the just-released CLASSICtoy (free, with a $0.99 in-app purchase feature unlock) – but that viewfinder finds ways to change depending on the mode. Turn on "Plastiq Vignetting", for example, and you see dark corners superimposed on the live view as you frame your shot. Another setting, "Cinematiq Landscape", restricts your view to a very wide bar. These two preview features are not new, but to my knowledge this is the first time they've found themselves in one place.

Photos can be captured live within the app, or chosen from your camera roll. The emphasis is clearly on the former, using this as an actual camera app. Using the camera roll is buried three-clicks deep in the interface. To that end, Plastiq Camera introduces a novel trick: background processing. After a short delay following a shot, during which the photo is copied into the app's own working space known as the "Darkroom", users may quit the app at any time, or just stay in it until the photos are ready. Processing continues whenever the app is running, and the finished picture is then, and only then, saved to the phone's camera roll. This is actually a good thing because Plastiq's photo processing is painfully slow.

My encounter with the first version was marked by disappointment. The vignetting was way too heavy, and often obscured all but a circular portion of the image's center. One could lift some of the fog with an app like iFlashReady, but it was an extra step and image fidelity suffered. The app took a photo the instant the screen was touched, rather than when the finger was removed, as it is with almost every other camera app including Apple's own.

Last but not least, many of the built-in effects (they're called Films) were far from useful. The first two were fine. "Plastiq classica" and "Polarius" produce green and blue/red color shifts respectively, with often pleasing results. The next one, "Vintage velvet" makes almost everything in the frame a bright red. "Ocheria gold" does the same thing, only yellow. You can imagine what "Monochromatica", "Super monochromatica", and "Hisepia" do. The last one, "Negablue", exists only as a parody of those Canon cameras that come preloaded with a "negative" effect to take creepy photos of one's smiling children. It must. I can't imagine why else it was included. You might say, "surely it does no harm to include an effect that maybe a few people might actually want", but you would be wrong. An app's design must consider its purpose. This app isn't called "1001 Free Fun Filters", and it happens to cost as much as Hipstamatic, one of the best faux-film toy camera apps on the market. Including a filter that virtually none of your users will find useful, with no way to hide it from the scrolling list of effects, is a questionable design decision.

Version 1.2 was just released today, and it thankfully remedies most of the app's shortcomings. A new "Plastiq Vignetting B" option is available, much milder and less restrictive. Capture is now on touch release, not initial touch. A buffered shooting mode has been introduced, decreasing shot-to-shot time, although processing time seems the same. Negablue hasn't been removed, and a new filter, "Retro realius", has been included. It is a fairly attractive blue-tinted, washed-out look that approximates some old film photography. On the other hand, another unusable effect has been introduced in the form of "Posteria", which is a posterizing effect I can't ever see using or getting from a film camera, which leads to a questioning of what Plastiq Camera's mission is. A way to get zany images, or a tool for film-like photography? Oh well, two steps forward and one back.

I would like to see an option like the one recently introduced into Hipstamatic, where a combination of film effect and lens could be randomly selected, but not before some of these more unhelpful ones are removed. The quality of the filters could stand to be improved as well, but I am confident we will see this happen over the next few updates, as the changes made in the first two have already demonstrated a willingness to build a great product.

Should it occur to you that I am nitpicking, calling for out-of-place filters to be removed/improved and all that, know that these are only reactions to expectations set by its name, visual presentation, and $1.99 price point. Two bucks isn't much at all, but remember that in the context of the App Store, 99 cents will buy you excellent tools like Cross Process, CAMERAtan, and TiltShift Generator. Those are what Plastiq Camera has to consider competition, and they all produce excellent results.

Perhaps the developer of Plastiq Camera has a different vision for his app than the one that is being communicated to me when I use it. From the Leica-esque logo and dim viewfinder, to references to plastic lenses throughout, this could be a great homage to analog photography, but as of now, with only 3-4 usable effects, it's got a little further to go.

Verdict: As of v1.2, this is a camera app with great potential that you can start using today and get good results from.

Rating: 3 / 5

Buy Plastiq Camera in the iTunes App Store.

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