1-Bit Camera Makes Hipstamatic Look Like a Hasselblad

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This doesn't look quite right thanks to JPG compression, but your get the idea
This doesn't look quite right thanks to JPEG compression, but you get the idea

8-bit pixel art is so last year. These days, all the cool kids and hipsters are into 1-bit photos. That’s right, one-bit. Now there’s an app that will render all your photographs as if they were taken on an old Nintendo Game Boy camera.

The app is called — somewhat unsurprisingly — 1-Bit Camera, and it’s dead simple to use. You can either snap a photo right into the lens hole on the front or back of your iPhone or iPad (the app is universal), or import from your photo library. You can choose high or low contrast modes, set the dithering pattern to either Atkinson or Bayer (named for Bill Atkinson and Bryce Bayer), and share out to Twitter, Tumblr or the Facebook.

And that’s it. Photos are saved to your camera roll automatically (they’re tiny, coming in at 70k or so), and the quality is surprisingly good. When seen as thumbnails, the Atkinson shots look like proper, non-shrunken photos, and the app is especially good at pepping up shots taken in low light.

There are a couple things missing. You can only shoot in portrait mode. This isn’t a problem for taking new pictures, as you can just rotate them later, but if you import a landscape-oriented photo the app takes a portrait-shaped slice from the middle.

Still, the app is just $1, and I have already had more than a dollar’s worth of fun just writing this article. And if you’re too cheap even for that, or you don’t have an iDevice, then there’s another app that does the same thing on the Mac. It’s called HyperDither, and it too is excellent.

[Via the Giz]

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