The Qt-written Camera Plus (also referred to as 'Camera+' on the developer's web site, confusingly) improves on CameraPro with:
- Customizable user interface. You can select from a wide range of colour/theme presets, you can tweak the menu transparency, and adjust right down to colour tweaks for every UI element. You can also adjust the basic UI layout by putting the functions you want on the side toolbars - it's not quite drag and drop but is still very easy.
- Faster access to presets. This is up front by default, offering one-tap access to auto, macro, sport and landscape, plus the ability to create custom presets of various settings and recall them from a pick list. In practice, these didn't seem to work properly in this first Qt version, but the developer's quite prolific with updates so I'm sure this will be picked up.
- Very high jpeg quality mode (up to 5 MB)
- Picture preview is now faster. The use of Qt has speeded up some aspects of the application (general camera operation and 'shot to shot' times) and slowed down others - I did notice lag in many of the scrolling dialogs of settings, for example. Again, no doubt these will be fixed in due course.
- Improved bracketing mode. This now takes five photos (rather than three) at different exposures, and you can fully customise how dark or light each should be. As with CameraPro, there's no HDR-like processing here on the phone - it would be far too CPU-intensive at non-trivial resolutions - instead, you're expected to combine the images back on the desktop. The one second 'shot to shot' time means that bracketing is easier than before, though to make the most of this photo trick, you really do need to be shooting on a tripod, so that the images are framed as similarly as possible.
- Ready for new camera firmware features. Presumably the developer has been testing Camera Plus in conjunction with Nokia - for example, a camera firmware update for the N8 has been officially announced, to follow on from the imminent Anna upgrade.
As usual, you win some, you lose some, with such a change in writing language/development system. The big negative here, other than the aforementioned lag in dialogs, is that Camera Plus can't set itself as the default camera application (i.e. launched with the camera shutter button) - though the developer's own HWKey solves this issue, albeit in slightly inelegant fashion.
Harald does note that Camera Plus is based on Nokia Qt Mobility and, as regular readers will know, the Qt runtimes can be a law unto themselves at this early stage in Qt's career. If you have a problem with Camera Plus not working, grab and install Qt Mobility onto your device, with Harald providing a handy runtime pack. Better still, use the wonderful fixqt.com for the latest stable Qt runtimes.
As usual, I've focussed(!) here on trying Harald's camera applications on my N8, the only Symbian^3 phone with a proper auto-focus camera - and the only phone which can really use all the features here, but do note that all the other Symbian^3/Anna phones with EDoF cameras can still use all the rest of the app's functions, those that don't reference focussing at all.
Comments welcome as to the relative merits of Camera Pro and Camera Plus, if you've tried both - I have to say that I'm leaning towards the former, for stability reasons, but I'm sure there's better long term development potential with this, the latter. Watch this space for an in-depth review of Camera Plus after the developer has got some of the teething troubles sorted.
Link: Camera Plus in the Ovi Store.
Steve Litchfield, AAS, 2 Aug 2011