Review: Sophie Cam
Score:
68%
Sophie Cam is the latest image manipulation app to be downloaded onto my Windows Phone. As the rest of the All About team will tell you, my photography skills are pretty much non-existent, but while I can't get the crisp clear shots needed for publication, I do like playing around with apps like this. So, how much have I enjoyed Sophie Cam?
Version Reviewed: 1.15.0.0
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The latest update to Sophie Cam has added a trial feature to the download options, and I can't stress this enough to developers - as the competition increases in the Windows Marketplace many people will be looking for a 'try' button, and if all you can show is 'buy' then you may get passed over for similar apps. Hopefully Sophie Cam is going to get a lot more people looking at the app now the developers have implemented the trial version, because this is a nice looking image manipulation app. It's not perfect, but now people can try the app and make the final call themselves.
The key to Sophie Cam is of course your photos and images. As with similar apps, you don't need to use the built in camera app on your Windows Phone, you can take your pictures from inside Sophie Cam, although the only setting available to tweak is turning the flash on or off.
Alternatively (and more likely) you can grab an image from your library - Sophie Cam works on a copy of this image, so when you save any new images they will be saved as new images, and not overwrite the initial image, which is obvious but always worth checking.
Sophie Cam comes up a little bit short here. On selecting a picture from the gallery, I was expecting to be able to zoom and pan the image before cropping it to the now fashionable 1:1 ratio square image. Nope, just panning the image is available, if you want to zoom in and take just a small square out of the image, you'll need to look elsewhere.
I think this is the biggest 'missing thing' in all of Sophie Cam. With the point and shoot nature of smartphones, it's rare to get the chance to perfectly frame a picture, and half of the utility in these image filter apps is getting the look and the framing just right for a strong impact on your social networks when you share the pictures. By missing a little of this functionality, Sophie Cam finds itself at a disadvantage to many of its competitors at a key moment in the life cycle of an image.
Right then, on to the filters.
Once you have your image ready to be tweaked, you'll see your options along the bottom. Rather than very quick renders of the selected image, a sample image set by the developers shows the different options available. I think this slows things down, as you want to see what each filter looks like on your own image, but in terms of keeping the app feeling snappy (and not hitting the battery too hard) I can see why a pre-render hasn't been implemented yet.
Naturally you can play around with these filters, and you'll find a few favourites you like to come back to. As it stands, you have twenty filters to play with in the current version. There's the standard filter pack with eleven 'classic' camera filters, an additional nine hipster filters, and new to this version, five vintage filters, all for you to play with. You can't see every filter in the strip along the bottom, just those in the currently selected pack.
It still amazes me that people think that Instagram's success was down to the filters - my personal feeling is that yes, they played a part, but the ease of sharing drove the very early press, and then it was the app that had the buzz and pulled away. So while it's nice to see all the filters on offer, I'm more interested in the sharing options.
This is where Windows Phone should have the advantage, as sharing is built into the operating system as a fundamental principle. It's not perfect though, as many third party apps have discovered, which is why Sophie Cam, along with all the other photo sharing apps, has to code its own sharing mechanism for images on Facebook, Flickr and Twitter. Logging on to each service is done in advance through the settings option, and you can toggle each service on or off for each picture depending on your mood.
Sophie Cam gets all the basics right, and has a really easy to understand interface. The 'filter/editing/tweaking your pictures' market is quite crowded though in the Marketplace, and that means an app missing any of the key features, or which has a clunky part of the interface is at a disadvantage. Sophie Cam is hurting itself with the lack of a zoom and crop tool.
Putting that aside, this is a stable app which handles the megapixel images generated by the Windows Phone OS, with a well put together UI that is pretty fast and has just enough options to not be complicated but still deliver some pretty sweet results. Yes it has rough edges, but this is where the advantage of a trial version comes in.
Are the rough edges showstoppers for you, or are they on the sidelines? Personally, the lack of zooming and cropping is close to a showstopper in daily use, so I'll be watching carefully for an update in the near future.
Reviewed by Ewan Spence at