First Look: Camera Zoom for iPhone

The iPhone's built-in camera is a prime target for improvements. We've seen iPhone cases with built-in wide-angle lenses, iPhone cases with zoom lenses, and a plethora of apps to manipulate photos. Camera Zoom (click opens iTunes) is a new US$0.99 app from KendiTech that provides a 4x digital zoom for your iPhone camera.

Camera Zoom displays a preview in real time, just like the regular camera app. You use a slider to adjust the level of zoom. After taking the photo, Camera Zoom tweaks it for the best possible quality.

For those of us with "real" digital cameras, the ability to zoom the iPhone's camera is nice. However, the picture quality of a digital zoom is never as good as you'll get with an optical zoom lens. As you can see with the example photos above, the zoomed image tends to be grainy. This is particularly true in low-light conditions. If you can put up with the degraded picture quality, Camera Zoom is an inexpensive way to add zoom capabilities to your iPhone.

I'm surprised that Apple approved this app, since the icon is titled "Camera" just like the real Camera app, and it duplicates the functionality of the Photos app as well. The latter isn't done very well, since you can't flick the screen to move between pictures in the camera roll.

This is version 1.0 of this app, however, and it's a good start to what could be an easy-to-use photo manipulation tool for the iPhone platform.