Review: ProCamera For iPhone

The stock camera on iOS isn’t a bad offering by Apple. It’s simple and incredibly quick. Feature wise one could say it’s a bit deficient. But things like face detection, burst mode and recently with iOS 7 and the iPhone 5s, 120fps slo-mo video recording.

If you’re looking for more, there’s a boatload of 3rd party options in the App Store that mainly surpass the stock camera as far as features are concerned. Preset shooting modes, granular control of a bevy of photo variables, filters and more can be found when venturing away from Apple’s stock camera app and into the arms of some third party offering.

Today, I’m taking a look at ProCamera by Cocologics to see if it’s a worthy alternative to Apple’s in-house app.

Design

The first impression of any app is similar to a book, the front cover or icon if you will. Chances are if a team spent a lengthy amount of time on an icon, the same attention to detail and care was put forth throughout the app. Pro Camera is like most camera apps, simple in utility. The prime function of Pro Camera is to take pictures. Understandably so, when trying to tack on more and more features, buttons, toggles and menus can get unruly and ultimately ruin the experience. With Pro Camera there isn’t a hint of that anywhere.

The UI is very much on the dark side and plays into iOS 7’s use of translucency well. That said, instead of light and frosted glass everywhere Pro Camera goes with more of a hud (read: dark transparencies) style.

The main view of the app has (from left to right) a thumbnail of the last taken image in your gallery, toggle to show/hide the second row of three icons (Video, Photo and Night modes), the camera button itself, a timed button (3 seconds) and the menu button. Up at the top of the screen on the far left you’ve got your flash enable/disable and on the far right, the camera rotator.

 

Hit the menu button and things quickly go from unassuming to pro looking really quick. All of those buttons that pop up are really toggles for onscreen info that you can chose to have display or not. You can very quickly load up the screen with a boat load of live photo info such as ISO level, Histogram, grids, tilt meter, white balance and more.

 

Within the menu of toggles there’s also the usual settings button which lets you configure things like timer delay, bias of the anti-shake feature (more stable to more shaky), a full screen trigger to use the entire display as the view finder which gets rid of the status bar, video zoom and more. One nice feature included if you tap the “more” on the top right is an option to control photo compression.

Usage & Impressions

I personally have hidden the default camera icon deep down in a folder. With Control Center and the camera shortcut there’s simply no need to have it anywhere on the main desktop area taking up space. Conversely, Apple still (stupidly) restricts setting custom default apps. If I could, Pro Camera would become the new default. Since I can’t, I have to relinquish a spot to Pro Camera (but also remember to navigate to it instead of a quick swipe up on the lock screen for the stock app.)

Inconvenience aside, Pro Camera is a great app. Despite the added features and all the information you have available one toggle away, the app never felt slow or sluggish. Even better is that super close up images seemed to focus better and more accurately with Pro Camera than the stock app. Speaking of which, I’m not sure that focusing problem is an iOS 7 thing or iPhone 5s thing. Either way, I know that I used to be able to take better close up images with iPhones and iOS versions of years past. Thankfully Pro Camera has solved that particular dilemma for now.

For $1.99 if you’re into photography of the mobile variety at all, Pro Camera is worth adding into the roster of photo apps worth checking out. It’s robust when you want it and simple when you need it. Good performance and a price that really no one should have a problem with. One of my favorites for sure.