A valid question might be 'why do you want to shoot a burst of a dozen photos in the first place? Don't they make for more images to sort and delete later?' Quite so, and even on the HTC One the 'zoey' mode (short for 'zoetrope') isn't enabled by default, but there are indeed occasions where burst mode is downright invaluable:
- shooting a sports moment, perhaps as your friend races past you or across the finish line
- shooting toddlers or babies, who are incapable of posing and who go through half a dozen facial expressions per second
- shooting animals (as here) or birds, some of which never stay still
You get the idea. If you can't think of a use for a 'burst' mode then move on, nothing to see here. But if the very idea of picking from a dense batch of photos taken at roughly the same time appeals to you (as it does to me) then read on.
Now, my real world use for burst camera features is shooting my family, plus small nephews and nieces. But I obviously can't put those examples online, for privacy reasons, so step up to the plate, Willow the guinea pig 8-) This shot was taken by Nokia Smart Shoot, below - click it to download the original JPG.
Here then are the various software options for achieving burst mode photography on Windows Phone, in my case on the Nokia Lumia 920. I did have an aim in mind - I wanted something similar to the set up on the HTC One, shooting fast enough to capture multiple expressions and moments, but not so fast that you end up with huge numbers of near duplicates and also have to sacrifice resolution. The figures I had in mind were 5 photos per second at around 2 megapixels each. Enough to be able to pick a winner and high enough resolution to be able to print, share or crop normally.
And if any of the solutions could match the HTC One's always-shooting function, where you get a few shots from before you pressed the shutter key, then so much the better.
Nokia Smart Shoot
This is one of Nokia's 'lenses' for the Windows Phone 8 Camera and, to be fair, its core purpose is more for shooting groups of adults, with one full resolution shot taken per second after the initial tap-to-focus. A group of 5 photos is then presented in 'flicker book' style and you can either pick a best shot or opt to edit, picking a (auto-detected) face and putting that expression/face into a different shot - hence the 'Smart Shoot' name.
The focussing and capture is simplicity itself, but the requirement here to take at 8 megapixels means that the burst frequency is too slow for most of the use cases above.
Microsoft BLINK
Also implemented as a Camera 'lens', BLINK is a true burst mode utility, not only shooting 16 photos in little over a second, but shooting and buffering all the while the viewfinder's focus locked (requiring you to use the phone's hardware shutter key), so you get three or four photos taken before you actually press the shutter key completely to initiate the burst capture, in exactly the same way as the HTC 'zoey'.
All of which sounds perfect, except that the cost of such fast capture is a very low output resolution, just 1 megapixel. This is fine for the Facebook generation but will disappoint you if you plan to do anything else with the shots. Plus, having 16 shots to choose from a limited one second period of real time is somewhat overkill, unless you really are trying to snap Usain Bolt or a hummingbird...
BurstCamera
Yet another Camera 'lens' (and, like each of these, also available via the main app list), BurstCamera works slightly differently, in that it captures a block of 1080p HD video and then strips out as many 2 megapixel still frames as you'd like. There's the chance to specifiy this and the only impact of choosing a higher number is that the 'processing' time is extended.
In practice, picking 5 photos per second (as per my target) and shooting for two seconds required about 12 seconds for the stills extraction. As with the other utilities here, you'd then save the ones you wanted to your Camera Roll or Saved Pictures album. 12 seconds may not be an issue though in the use cases above. For example, your friend has just run or biked past, you've got the shots and he's now long gone, so it's really not a problem if the application takes a dozen seconds to sort itself out. And you end up with shots that are high enough resolution that they can be blown up to full-screen on a desktop or TV, or printed out, without too much embarrassment.
Turbo Camera
Admittedly a fairly flexible tool, encompassing everything from 'burst' to time 'lapse', Turbo Camera disappoints at the former end but only offering VGA snaps taken very fast (up to 30 shots per second) or 3 megapixel shots taken once per second - and nothing in between.
Given that shot to shot times on most fast modern smartphones tend to be of the order of a second, there's almost no benefit of a burst mode utility at that frequency, and VGA resolution is arguably too low even for Facebook (which is saying something).
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Each of the software solutions here has its benefits (Smart Shoot for image quality, Blink for sheer speed and pre-shutter capture, Turbo Camera for extended functionality), but for the specific burst mode I was looking for, Harald Meyer's 'BurstCamera' is the clear winner, with a good balance between speed and quality. I've tried it (on the Lumia 920) in the same situations as the all-in-hardware HTC One, with its 'zoey' mode - and it achieved results that were 'comparable'.
Your comments welcome though. If you've been on the same quest as me, which burst camera applications did you find most useful on the Windows Phone platform?