New iPhone Photo App: UC Camera - WYSIWYG

App Store Description: The world's first TRUE LIVE camera app - the "Veritas Engine" premier works with iPhone3GS, iPhone4, or iPod Touch4 with iOS 4.2 or higher.

Note: This is a low-res app, saving at just 640 x 480 pixels!!

Features:

• Full speed LIVE preview in RETINA resolution: WYSIWYG at its best, a class of its own
• Full frame in full screen: No crop, no letterbox, just a 100% "viewfinder"
• Near-zero shutter lag: You'll hardly miss a shot.
• Superb image quality: Veritas Engine's high-precision arithmetics guarantee a never-seen-before image quality - even while previewing!
• 19 quick presets for easy use: Tap the palette button, slide the screen to choose an effect appealing to you the most. No sample images are necessary since you'll recognize the differences instantly on the preview screen itself.
• 78 effects to go: Are the 19 presets not enough for you? Then we welcome you to the "Advanced" tab. Just combine 6 primary effects with 7 color filters and 6 radial color filters, resulting in 78 effects to start with.
• Create your own effects: Tap the equalizer button, adjust the intensities of the selected primary effect and color filter at your heart's desire. Once stored in one of the 32 slots, it's just as accessible as one of the quick presets.
• Positioning the radial center: Drag the preview screen to put the "radial center" ANYWHERE. You'll suddenly realize how brutally expressive your favorite "Lomo" can get, just to give an example.
• Shake Proof feature: Delays the shot up to 1 second when shaking over a certain degree is detected.
• Facebook support: Upload the pictures taken to your Facebook account directly & conveniently.
• Front camera support
• Flash support

Primary effects:

• Normal
• Vintage
• Vignetting
• Whitening
• Sketch
• Chalk

Color filters:

• Normal
• Gray
• Sepia
• Lust (red)
• Bleu de France (blue)
• Aureolin (yellow)
• English A o (green)

Quick presets:

• Normal
• Lomo
• Princess Syndrome
• Black & White
• Natural Sepia
• 60's Sepia
• Cartoon
• Vintage Red
• Vintage Blue
• Vintage Yellow
• Vintage Green
• Sketch
• Matrix
• Milk Coffee
• Strawberry Jelly
• Ice Candy
• Mango Slush
• Melon Pudding

App Store Link: UC Camera - WYSIWYG; Price: £1/19/$1.99/€1.59

Update on Sunday, December 12, 2010 at 10:27AM by Glyn Evans

Following comments made here on the iPhoneography blog about this app, I received the following feedback from the apps developer.

"I originally wanted to give you some technical backgrounds and update schedule with a redeem code upon request. But things went so fast, and well, I'm sorry about the trouble you went in.

I read all the comments and I think I owe you and them very long explanations.

1. Support Page: We set the availability date on 12th Dec, but somehow, Apple did a mistake and did it directly after the review is done. :-( We are currently working on a (temporary) support page for UC Camera. I Hope it to be finished until tomorrow.
2. Shutter Lag: The shutter lag is much shorter than it appears to be. Actually, consistently shorter than the iPhone's default camera. You could do a head-to-head comparison and would agree with me on that. Once you hear the shutter sound, the shot is already taken, and you are safe to move your device. If you include the "Printing(saving file)" time to shutter lag like dann apparently did, there is simply no other answer than that our definition of shutter lag is the time between button pressure and actual shooting. It's quite simple simply not to show the "Printing" message like many other apps do. If it's what people want, no problem at all, I'd say. We just made a mistake of being too honest IMO. The upcoming update will "fix" this.
3. Preview Speed: What piet needs is an optical viewfinder. There can't be any electric viewfinder without any delay. And he is right with "maybe worse". Although our image processing routine is insanely optimized to minimize the processing time, it's not zero, resulting in further delay, albeit very small. With "full speed" we mean the realtime processing speed. Honestly, did you ever see an iPhone app doing realtime image processing THIS fast? You may mention "Camera Fun", but it does crop out the upper and lower area. And more importantly, it does process the image in RGB format while UC Camera does it in YUV which is THE proper way preserving the image quality. The gap in image quality is quite evident therefore. Just compare Sketch and Sepia effects of both for example. The standard preview pipeline works following : sensor==(DMA1)==>YUV==(DMA2)==>RGB==(DMA3)==>LCD (DMA : Direct Memory Access, HW accelerated) While Camera Fun interrupts after DMA2, processes RGB data and gets onto the pipeline again with DMA3, UC Camera interrupts after DMA1, processes YUV data, and you know what? Apple doesn't grant access to DMA2 to third parties once out of the pipeline.So UC Camera is on its own and does it in SW, and YUV to RGB conversion is an extremely demanding task. Actually, it currently consumes almost as much computing power as the image processing itself. And that means, UC Camera's preview frame rate will double (30fps then) once Apple makes DMA2 available to third parties like Google did with their Android 2.2. (of course, we will have to modify our codes accordingly then) You could show UC Camera to programmers familiar with image processing, and when you tell them that it does both image processing AND YUV-RGB conversion in SW in realtime, they won't believe it. Yes, written completely in hand optimized assembly, our Veritas Engine is THAT fast, and we dare to claim it to be the fastest implementation on ARM platform.
4. Resolution: Yes, we completely agree with John and Ray, VGA resolution is far from sufficient. We are very well aware of this and working hard to make higher resolutions available with the upcoming update which will be finished within next week. I just hope it to be available on AppStore before Christmas fearing the extended approval process by Apple. UC Camera was capable of capturing images in the device's maximum resolution up to beta version, but it was remove at the RC version due to the problems John mentioned : huge shutter lag and occasional lockups. Hers is what's causing the problems above: iPhone's images sensor offers three different preview modes: 1. Photo (maximum resolution); 2. VGA; 3. HD (1280*720, not available on 3GS)

For realtime image processing, we need to obtain the frame buffer in realtime, and it's not possible in Photo mode. (Not Apple's fault, just a HW restriction IMO) Therefore, realtime image processing works only in mode 2 and 3, and in order to capture the image in maximum resolution, a mode change to 1 is required which takes forever. And changing modes back and forth makes the preview pipeline quite prone to lockups. We've been trying hard to get it to work properly, but now, we are almost concluding that it's simply not possible with the current API. (if at all)

So what remains is the HD mode. We are currently working on this, and in the end, two new resolutions will be available : 960*720 and 1280*720. (bad luck for 3GS here) The latter one will capture wider area than visible on the preview screen however.

I hope this to be sufficient for our customers, and we'll officially request Apple's technical support for the maximum resolution after the update. (I still doubt that to be possible though)

Why we didn't use the HD mode earlier? Well, a bug preventing capturing images at all while in mode 2 and 3 has been plaguing iOS up to 4.1 and recently got fixed with iOS4.2. And it made using HD mode completely pointless and drove us insane."

Comments

[John Balestrieri]

As an iPhone developer who was working on a similar problem, I was curious to see if this app really could pull off high-rez previews with low-lag between preview->capture. I bought the app and tested... the previews are indeed retina resolution, but the captured images (those saved to the film roll) are only 640x480.

[dann]

this app doesn't have 'near zero' shutter lag i wish the "developing" screen that wastes 3-4 seconds of my life would be a background task, like procamera. also, contacting apple for a refund gave me a 'contact developer' link that sent me to youtube?

awesome.

[piet]

do they mean with "full speed live preview" that there is no delay on your
screen?
if so, it does not work.
on my ipod 4g with os 4.2 it's just as delayed as any other app, maybe worse.
it almost could be sold as an stop-motion app.

no support also

[Ray]

My biggest gripe is the lousy output resolution. I wish I had read John's post before downloading the app and spending the $1.99. What am I going to do with a 640x480 photo?

[Glyn Evans]

I'm sorry I was not able to test this app before posting. The developer did not mention this was a low-res app, else I would have noted it. I have updated the post and emailed the developer, asking them to respond to the comments here.

[Dann]

Thanks, Glyn. hopefully we get some feedback!

[piet]

It was a good text about the app though,
I was sold..... ""this is the one"" : )

[BK]

I would maybe put the low rez warming above the read more.

[UC Camera]

Hi, I'm one of the developers of UC Camera and read all the comments.

I'm very aware of VGA being far from sufficient and working hard to get higher output resolutions.

The next version will be finished within next week, and I hope it to be available on the AppStore before Christmas. (Apple's approval process takes about a week after uploading the binary)

It will feature resolutions of 960*720 and (most probably) 1280*720 plus an improved shake proof function. (Unfortunately, 3GS is stuck with VGA though.)

It's due to a HW/API restriction that prevents capturing in the maximum resolution while the preview frame buffer is pipelined for realtime processing.

The support page will be available after the first update.
Meanwhile, you can contact us via twitter @uccamera. We'll be gladly listening more to your criticisms and complaints.

Thank you.

// John : Would you please contact us? We could share our experiences and help each other improving our products.

// Piet : With "full speed live preview" we mean the speed of the realtime image processing. Sorry if you mistook it for the preview delay which is physically unavoidable on "electric viewfinders".

// Ray : I hope the higher resolutions in the upcoming version to be sufficient for you.

//Glyn : I didn't receive an email from you yet. I sent you a very long story yesterday though.

* We already contacted Dann.

[Geoff white]

Well I have a 3GS like alot of people so I guess I won't be getting this one,pretty dissapoonting.

[Geoff white]

Or am I wrong being that I don't know much about photography lingo, will this still produce low quality photos for 3GS ?

[John Balestrieri]

This is accurate; that is as good as I would expect to see from any app, given the currently exposed iOS functionality and the current hardware.

UC Camera: Happy to drop you an email to discuss camera SDK experiences. (But, to share some marketing experience here, I think all this could have been easily avoided by simply stating the capture resolution in the iTunes description.)

[John Balestrieri]

(when I said this was accurate, I was referring to text I was quoting, but it got stripped from my comment after it was posted)

[UCCamera]

Well, below are some sample images taken with the upcoming version 1.1

1280*720 and 960*720 pix.

http://img.ly/2DBU
http://img.ly/2DBV
http://img.ly/2DBW
http://img.ly/2DBX
http://img.ly/2DBZ
http://img.ly/2DC0
http://img.ly/2DC3

[Glyn Evans]

Thanks for the update, but HD falls well short of full resolution!!

[UC Camera]

Just uploaded version 1.1 with following improvements :

- 960*720 & 1280*720 output resolutions on iPhone4 and even iPodTouch4!
- Improved "Shake Proof" - very strict now, up to 4 seconds delay when not steadily held (It's actually a bug fix to tell you the truth. Works very well now)
- Geo-tagging feature
- EXIF user comment tag containing effects' name and parameters
- Much shorter duration saving images

It might be available on the AppStore before Christmas since Apple tends to be very quick approving updates before long holidays. If not, I guess ten days from now :-(

Correct me if I'm wrong : Is there no photography app yet that lets you capture images in HD resolution with an iPod?
Quite strange since it's quite easy to implement. If then, we'll be enjoying being the first.