I’ve tried to like it, I really, really have, but it’s just not good. I’ve given it months of use and quite a few software updates, and I still just absolutely hate it. You would think it would be right up my alley, I’m a tech guy and a camera nerd, it’s perfect, right? Absolutely not, it sucks, it sucks so bad!
First off, the one thing is does well is launch the camera. And launch ANY camera, that’s awesome. I’m really glad they set it up so third party camera developers can tap into it and use the button to control their camera. That’s the only good thing.
Everything else about the camera control is garbage. It’s just too touchy and too fiddly. The whole point of a dedicated camera control was to make the experience of taking photos with your cell phone and make it more tactile, more like shooting with an actual camera. That’s an idea I can really get behind, but in practice it just straight up doesn’t work.
First off, I absolutely hate the “Swipe” gesture to change settings, and as far as I can tell there’s no way to turn it off. It’s way too sensitive. If you’re holding your phone with your finger on the camera button, you’re likely changing whatever setting you have it set to just by like moving around. I have it set to EV comp, which seemed like it would be awesome, but in reality it just means I’ve inadvertently changed the EV on damn near every shot because my finger moved laterally 1/10 of a mm at some point before I took the shot and now I’m at -0.7 ev for absolutely no reason.
It’s even worse if you use that for zoom and find yourself at some weird random in between focal length for no reason.
I thought the recent update that enabled a half press for AE/AF lock would be exactly what I needed, but it also sucks out loud. Unlike an actual camera where half pressing the shutter button is easy and repeatable, “Half pressing” the camera control button is fraught. If you press, but not enough, you are still in the “Fuck up your exposure” mode, and if you press a little bit too much you’re taking a picture. It requires way too much mental energy to press exactly the right amount to get AE/AF lock. Maybe this is a me problem, but I doubt it. With any of my actual cameras, I can change settings and mode effortlessly without having to take my face away from the viewfinder. With the camera control button, I spend more time trying to determine what I’m doing to the button than I do framing a shot.
I don’t think there’s any magic bullet fix or anything, so I wish they would give you a dumb mode where the button just launches the camera and acts as a shutter button and nothing else so at least it doesn’t get in my way. In reality though, I’ll likely just continue to ignore it. Halide has an awesome implementation of this. You can use the swipey boi on the button just like in the default iPhone camera, but you can also just set it to “Lock” which means swiping on it will do nothing, and it acts solely as a shutter button, which is exactly what I want.
