Essential Camera
It includes several different, easy-to-use, modes and features, like Portrait Mode, Black and White mode, and more! And you can share them directly with friends and family or on social media—like Facebook, Instagram, and more—with just a few taps.
Essential Camera features:
• Tiny Planet mode: See your entire world in a whole new way! With Tiny Planet mode, you can easily capture, edit, and share 360-degree photos and videos right from the Essential Camera app. No third-party apps, necessary. *
• AutoHDR (High Dynamic Range): Automatically detects and captures HDR scenes. Recovers more shadows and highlights details—so you get the most natural photos possible without having to layer on a bunch of filters.
• Portrait mode: Create a shallow depth-of-field effect to make your subject (person or thing) stand out from the background! Tap to focus and adjust the amount of blur in real-time—so you can see what your shot will look like before taking it!
• Black and White mode: Works with the dedicated monochrome sensor in your PH-1 to create rich black and white photos—so your pictures are vibrant with great low-light detail.
• Video recording: Record your videos in stunning 4K resolution at 30 frames per second (fps) or 1080p HD at 30fps or 60fps.
• Slo-mo video: Record slow-motion videos in 720p HD at 120fps.
• Edit: Auto-enhance, apply filters, crop, tilt or straighten, and even adjust light and color with an incredible amount of detail.
• Grid lines: Easily frame and take more striking photos and videos with 3 x 3, 4 x 4, and Golden Ratio grids (available in all modes).
Other features include:
• Burst mode
• Timer mode (2 or 10-second countdown)
• Auto-Flash
• Tap to focus
• Share location
* Requires Essential 360 Camera
Category : Photography
Reviews (30)
The first 6 months the camera worked as it should. After one of the updates the camera started to malfunction. It started to freeze up or fail after taking a few pictures. As time has gone on it then would at random filter pictures in different colors such as green, yellow or red. Then the camera would only operate in black and white but only for a few seconds. Then only the selfie function would work in color. Now nothing works. The camera works in other apps so that's not it.
The app works great on my Essential Phone. But a simple traffic analysis of the Essential Camera app is showing that they are sending data to Facebook (Graph API) without our consent (among many other trackers). There is no legitimate reason to do so, a camera app should work 100% offline (except crash reports maybe). Sad to see Essential doesn't have good privacy practices
Pictures taken on the rear camera is great and so is it's portrait mode. The monochrome camera useful in low light situations, bringing out more detail in the dark with as little to no noise as possible . Overall it's great....well except the front camera which lacks sharpness and detail in dimly lit places. As for the 360° camera, it's just FUN and amazing to use, No complaints there.
New update doesn't work with power button shortcut. Others have reported this same issue. When pressing the power button twice to bring up the camera, it often presents a blank screen. You can't even take a picture or video of that black screen. It probably has something to do with not being able to get exclusive access to the camera when the app opens.
I want a manual focus option, and options to take long exposures would be appreciated as well. It works OK, however, it is frustratingly often out of focus. Also, it's essentially IMPOSSIBLE to take a picture of lightning, or to use a steadycam to capture stars or the moon.
It works.. .. somewhat. Photos okay at the best, low light performance in comparison to HTC One A9 average at the best. Digital image stabilization missing. Needs work. 360 camera nice feature thus 3 stars. I hope Essential will not give up. Potential is there. Dropping off 1 star. After last update 360 camera causes phone to reboot if battery is below 70%.
This app stopped being compatible with my 360 camera. All it does is light up it's small led and buzz with it's loud internal fan. Not only is the 360 camera not reliable and usable at one year, the regular camera photos have not dependably taken any good photos based on the hardware. Pretty much because of this phone and app I miss over 3/4 of my hand held photos come out blurry and not sharp.
Can't use tiny planet like it says, not even that many options for a photographer to use on their phone. Just 3 options. If your someone you regularly takes pictures, I'd highly recommend getting another app. Dissatisfied, because I can't get a better camera and am stuck with this please update and will give a better review.
Fine camera, basic app, dreadful autofocus. Nobody should complain about the camera, is it the best out there? Nope. But since the iPhone 5, every phone camera has become VERY good. This app is a little light on the features. It is nice that some very popular modes are a quick click away (portrait, b&w, selfie), but where is the pro modes? I want to be able to mess with my settings, change my iso, aperture and focus setting. It would help me solve the biggest problem with this camera and the only thing people should have a legit complaint about: The auto focus is horrendous on this phone. It almost never focuses on the stuff I am shooting. It is pull your hair out frustrating. That is the only update I am waiting for. Otherwise the photo quality is good enough for this generation of camera. But please find a fix for this auto focus and add some pro modes to the app. I love this phone and think it's a crying shame that they will probably never release a Ph-1X2.
The app is trash. After updating to Android P the phone restarts while the 360 camera is connected. I blame it on the app not working well enough with P. Makes my 360 camera pretty useless. I wish I could use a 3rd party app but I don't want to lose Slow-Mo or have two camera apps. I wish this app would just work
A significant drop off in focus speed and accuracy resulting in poor reliability and picture quality since the android 10 update. Particularly bad in low lighting, but that also includes daytime indoor shots. This really needs to improve.
Could be better but overall it's a decent stock camera app with all the essential functions. I wish there was a shortcut to quickly access the monochrome camera. The look of the monochrome hdr photos come out really nice.
The camera app is responsive and produces great images. The portrait mode is really excellent and better than that of the big named phones in my opinion. However this app is inexpicably missing a Panorama mode. Would have been 5 stars if pano feature existed.
Most recent update has significantly improved the quality of pictures taken - thumbs up to the dev team responsible. I'd suggest they also consider reducing image compression - I suspect it's partly responsible for the poor image quality issues with this app.
Wonderful camera, wonderful device. I would be cautious reading the reviews because they cherry-pick little bitty things that really don't take away from your experience. It's a bloody miracle we have instant cameras in the first place and this one works just fine, in fact, its quite high quality.
Mediocre app on a stellar phone. The 360 camera causes overheating and critical phone shutdown - no warning and no crash dump that I can find. Fix this soon or a great many people will have to get rid of the phone from excessive heat stress on the MB of the phone. But the phone is so beautiful I will regret losing the use of it.
Very poor in lower light conditions. I have also had issues with the application shutting down when attaching the 360 camera. It seems to take decent pictures in bright conditions.
Good camera. No complaints from me. I don't use it to snap professional photos. Just everyday life. It would be nice having a front facing in portrait mode, and eis. That given essential is amazing with the updates. Great phone great software!
It's an awesome camera, the last update totally messed it up though. It no longer focuses in anything except black and white mode, which is infuriating. Please fix this, the camera is practically useless
For the most part I have found the camera to be fairly decent. One feature I would love to see added though would be the ability to get both black and white and colored pictures at the same time. I like the black and white camera a lot but I want the color as well.
I love this phone and Essential for continious support. I've taken some amazing pictures with this app and phone. Would buy this phone over and over again. No other company offers the quality, beauty and update speed as the Essential. Hands down the best!
Not sure if it's a hardware or software issue, but camera us the lowest point of this otherwise amazing phone. Pictures need to be a little brighter, more colorful and present a better UI when using it
Photo quality is getting better, but it's still random crashed while keep using the camera for a while. Needs to quit the app or even reboot the device to continue using camera.
It's too simple for the kind of phone we got and hardware they included. We need other apps in order to get more functions and better features (i.e portrait mode).
After getting the phone and updating to pie and updating this app it would not update the 360 camera. It keeps saying connection error. I checked the connections there is no dirt or plastic on the connections.
After updating to Android 10 Everytime I plug the 360° cam my phone restart, since I've been using this camera with other Android version perfectly, it's seems that Essential hasn't updated this camera app to optimize it on Android 10.
App isn't bad, but it is missing a panoramic setting. It takes great photos tho. If you could add a panoramic view it would be awesome.
Pictures are fuzzy and out of focus towards the edges. About 20% of the photo is useless. And I'm get a force close with the toast "a critical error has occurred".
Pictures are only good with decent lighting and object being shot is staying still but besides that it's really bad. Camera hardware is great though, software isn't.
Low light performance is bad. Color is off, focusing takes a long time(unreasonably long) and images are generally grainy. Many of these issues exist under normal conditions also... I usually don't rate and comment on apps but the developer knew the camera was a sticky point from the beginning and has not yet managed to get it to perform on par with the hardware. I use free 3rd party software that produces better images across all metrics, speed, resolution, color, level of control.