Pinhole Camera returns as Pinhole HD

Pinhole [camera] is back with a slightly newer name [Pinhole HD], higher resolution saves, some extra features, lots of bugs [read my comments below], and all for another £0.69/$0.99/€0.79.

App Store Description: Famous pinhole camera effect for your iPhone. Experience the very history of photography - pinhole camera was the first camera ever, constructed by Ancient Greeks in the 4th century B.C.

Home made pinhole cameras (consisting of a light-proof box with a small hole without lens) became very popular because of their ability to deliver dreamy, surreal landscape pictures.

Pinhole Camera App for iPhone brings you the authentic feeling of simple handmade pinhole camera with all of its characteristic blurness, saturation and specifically dimmed margins.

View your unique photos made with Pinhole Camera App in Pinhole custom gallery, share them with your friends via Facebook or mail. Join the Pinhole community, participate in best photo contest on our Facebook fan page.

Features:

• full iPhone 4 resolution
• photo library import & export
• new photo frames
• characteristic pinhole "lens" distortion
• more realistic double exposition
• developing in background
• adjustable parameters in gallery (film, frame, lens distortion effect, expo blend)

App Store Link: Pinhole HD; Price: £0.69/$0.99/€0.79

Editors comments: Pinhole Camera has returned to the App Store as Pinhole HD, however whilst testing the app with the intention of writing a full review, it constantly crashed [exiting the app], continuously failed to load photos from the camera roll [photo selected, but failed to import], the controls are not intuitive, and to top it all, the app regularly rebooted my iPhone!!

As a result of these major bugs I have not been able to test this app fully, or be able to write a full review, but what I can say, is avoid this app until all the bugs have been ironed out.

Comments

[Richard Bailey]

Strange Glyn that you have experienced crashing and camera roll problems as I haven't had any crashes or problems with the app at all and quite the results it produces both from camera and camera roll. One criticism I do have though is that it can take ages to process sometimes.

Richard

[iBod Technologies]

Great app and really creates pinhole photos well. Never had any crashes on my iPhone.

www.printingsearcher.co.uk

[Luxtra]

No crashes here, but slooooow! I agree the interface is not very intuitive.

[Mike]

No problems here, really love this app and glad it's back..

[Suzé]

It takes forever to develop a photo, when you delete a photo it freezes. And the color has changed from the old version, colors are waay too saturated for pinhole. Black & White isn't too bad but both color options are too saturated. The lens distance option is non-existent. It doesn't change a thing.
Really disappointed with this version. Hope they get the bugs worked out.

[Andrea "Norbu56" Bigiarini]

I'm still awaiting the update of the old Pinhole Camera bug that non center the shot in the IOS 4.xx
I have to bought this?
I don't think so ....

[Nox Dineen]

The original Pinhole Cam app was one of the first I got when I switched from Droid to iPhone, and remains one of the only low res apps I've got on my phone. If it had supported full res it would probably have been my most used app over this past year.

I bought the new version the day it was released (cause I'm a huge nerd who checks many times a day for new photo apps) and it's been running stable on my old 3GS so far.

The developer sent me an email yesterday, because I'd previously submitted a bug report for the old app. Apparently the old version was developed by a couple guys, and the one who owned the dev account that app was associated with opted not to continue. That's the reason Pinhole HD is being released as a new app rather than an update.

[Digital Artist]

Had the older version which image quality was really nice effect, the new version image effect I see is NOT even close to what the older version produced. It is surely missing that "pinhole look and feel".

The developer needs to go back and 100% match that "look and feel" which the new version simply dies not. Pinhole HD needs a fix or with some many other apps out there you can just about get the same effect why use it.

Please step back to the original... It was true pinhole "look and feel".

[Yoshiyahu]

I saw the issues Glyn was having with this app, but an IG friend was happy to see an update after liking it before, so I decided to try it.

The interface is icky. I don't know who thought the whole doodle app thing was a good idea, and who buys apps because the interface looks scribbled by a kid, but apparently lots of people do, because we keep getting crappy looking interfaces. Just because the resulting pic is a pinhole pic doesn't mean that I want the interface to look and feel crappy.

Don't like the loooong development times, esp for things like lens distance, where the effect of the changes isn't at all evident, after a huge wait for development...

It sucks that you can't see any preview when you are blending the exposures... you have to move the slider, wait for the results, move the slider, wait for results...

But you know what? I haven't had any crashes on my 3GS. So that's a plus.

While I agree the colors would be better less saturated, I do like the resulting look of the photos using the x color film. The double exposure feature has delivered some interesting images for me as well.

That being said, I really dislike the feel of this app. Long development times aren't in themselves a killer. I am happy waiting for Hipstamatic prints, for instance. But when the interface look and feel is also bad, and you also have long development times, it just feels icky, and honestly, I don't want to use an app and feel icky while doing it, even if I like the results, so I am not sure whether I'll keep this or delete it and hope for a makeover or updates.