Headline Feeds
Camera Zoom, an app by KendiTech, is available for 99 US cents at the App Store.
Using an iPhone for just a little over a year now has changed my behavior in a few subtle ways. I almost never check personal email at my desktop, I have less fear of the DMV, and my peripheral vision while walking has improved greatly thanks to a few notable, non-fatal incidents.
I also tend to take certain attributes of the iPhone's touchscreen for granted. I sometimes forget that not every pretty image on a shiny screen can zoom in and out with a pinch or pull of my thumb and forefinger.
Unfortunately, the iPhone's own camera lacks this spread-to-zoom capability, and I don't know how many times I've had to re-learn that fact when trying to get a closer image on whatever I'm taking a picture of.
However, there are several third-party apps that bring zoom capabilities to the iPhone's camera, one of which is Camera Zoom.
Digital vs. Optical
The app opens just like the iPhone's own Camera function -- your screen becomes a viewfinder with a button for snapping a photo, one for looking at your picture roll, and one for settings.
Camera Zoom doesn't actually zoom in and out with pinch or pull gestures, though. Instead, it gives you a slider bar at the bottom of the screen. This isn't a problem; it still does what it says it does (though I'm still trying to break the everything-is-multitouch mentality).
The options you're presented with in Settings are pretty basic. You can set to snap a photo when tapping the screen instead of just the little camera button at the bottom; tell it where to place the zoom slider; and set it to ask whether you really want to save a shot before doing so.
There's also a setting called "320x480." Turning it on will cause your pictures to be saved faster and appear less blurry. However, at that size, they'll also be smaller than the photos you'd take with the normal Camera app.
With a digital camera, zooming can be done either digitally or with a physical optical lens. They really do sell optical zoom lenses for iPhones. They look kind of ridiculous, but the image they deliver to the phone's optical sensor doesn't need to be cropped, stretched or digitally smoothed over in order to get a close-up shot. You still get your two megapixels' worth (three if you're using a 3G S).
On the other hand, when you zoom digitally, like with this app, the physical lens is left unchanged. Instead, the data created once the photo is snapped is what gets cropped and smoothed over. The outcome with digital zooming is that the resolution is usually dumbed down. It's pretty much the only way to achieve a zoom effect in an iPhone, at least until Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) figures out a way to add in a real optical zoomer without making it either an inch and a half thick or cost $3,000.
Camera Zoom's "320x480" on/off setting at least gives you the option of telling it how dumbed-down you want the image to be. With it on, your photo will be a little less pixellated yet also a little smaller.
Cuts Down Post Production
As a digital zoom utility, Camera Zoom can't technically do a whole lot that can't be done with a quick and dirty Photoshop job on an image taken with the iPhone's own built-in Camera app. Using desktop software to zoom way in on an image taken with the standard app gets you more or less the same image as one taken with Camera Zoom at full extension -- something pretty grainy and rough. For now, the only way to get a zoom shot from your iPhone without losing resolution is to pick up one of those bulbous external lenses.
Still, digital zoom apps like this one have their place. Images still look OK if you don't zoom all the way in. Sometimes you just want to get more of something into the frame but you can't actually move yourself any closer to it, in which case this sort of app fits the bill. Even if what you're doing is basically just cropping and enlarging, at least you're able to do it in the camera itself without any post-production work.
