This review originally appeared within iLounge’s iOS Gems series within the compilation article, iPhone Gems: Top Photography and Image Manipulation Apps. Additional details may be found in the original article.
Like the name suggests, CameraBag ($5) is an application that simulates the photographic qualities of five classic cameras using various filters, crops, and other techniques. The app’s main screen has a row of five buttons at the top, each representing a different camera. “Helga” mimics the Holga camera, an inexpensive medium format film toy camera that was first released in 1982, while “Lolo” mimics the Russian LOMO LC-A Compact Automat camera, known for its overly colorful, vibrant, and sometimes blurry picture pictures.
1974 and 1962 are approximations of normal cameras from those times, which shoot in color and black and white, respectively; Cinema approximates the look of a wide-screen film shot.
Three buttons appear towards the bottom for taking a picture, saving the image, or accessing a saved image, along with an info button offering access to app preferences. In the preferences, users can toggle the auto-save after shot, save original photo, enable cropping, enable border features on and off, and choose output size. The maximum resolution is 1200, which appears to represent 1600×1200, although some of the filters that include a crop will leave the user with slightly smaller images, such as 1200×900. In our testing, the app crashed with some frequency, but the problems weren’t easy to recreate, and a restart always seemed to fix the problem.
Despite all that, the output of the filters is undeniably polished, with each providing an image that looks similar to the output of the intended camera — Lomo fans in particular will be quite happy with the output.
We do feel that $5 is a lot to charge for an app like this, especially when one considers that it’s basically a set of five filters. The developers claim that new filters will be added in a future update, and while this is certainly welcome news for customers, the app also needs some work to help fix its nagging bugs. At the time of this writing, CameraBag is “on sale” for $3, a more reasonable price, in our opinion. It’s currently worthy of our general recommendation; fewer bugs and more filters would make it even better.
