App Review: Plastiq Camera
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.
