HiLo Lens - my first steps

Mik

Mik

MobiLurver
MobiSupporter
Real Name
Michael
Device
iPhone X
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If you want to know more about what HiLo Lens is I recommend to take a look at http://shop.hilolens.com/.

I want to post my experiences with HiLo Lens and apps that support it. For the apps, Dear Developers, Please consider to make support for this great tool.

For my tests I used the HiLo Lens app from the lens developer itself
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and Pure from Mike Hardaker. Pure, and 645Pro, has support for the lens in the settings menu.
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HiLo Lens app: First thing I noticed was the iPhone went hot and battery drained fast. It was because of the option called "Straighten photo". The lens is a wide angle lens of some sort and has barrel distortion, which is very common for this sort of lens and nothing to worry about. The straighten photo option is to correct this distortion and when switched on, the app does so permanently, which seems to need quite some power. So I switched it off to correct the distortion later on. Then I realised the app has no feature to do the correction after an image was shot. You can use Skrwt instead.

The HiLo Lens app has it's quirks. When you start the app you have to set the orientation of the camera. That's ok, but if you tap the home button and the app goes to background and you then double tap home button and bring the app back, then you have to set the orientation again. When you open camera roll from within the app, you can easily rotate an image. After you rotated an image you tap on a tick mark to save the rotation. And then you are here:
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Now you are stuck of some sort. You can't continue to use the camera roll, no buttons will respond, only thing that works here is the Cancel button on top right. And another thing that I can't get the hang of is the camera roll and what images it shows. It don't show all images on the device, just the images I shot lately with the app. I beamed some HiLo Lens app images from another device via AirDrop to the actual device, but these images won't show up in the apps camera roll.

Pure app: This app has some quirks too in relation to HiLo Lens support. Or maybe I am not ready for this. Pure has problems with the orientation of the images. I expected What-you-see (in the viewfinder) is-what-you-get (in camera roll). For me it was not always the case. Some images are ok, others were rotated wrong or others just mirrored. I switched off the HiLo Lens support and dismouted the lens to do some normal shots. But these shots were also mirrored. I had to kick Pure out of memory and start it again.

So HiLo Lens support is not at it's best at the moment. But there is nothing game breaking. I had and will have a lot of fun with the lens and the apps supporting it.

The lens for itself is great stuff. I like the wider angle of view. I like the way you can hold the device to do shots. The lens looses some sharpness outside of the centre, but this is what you always have to expect from a wide angle lens. And you may loose a very little clarity or detail.

And now some images :)

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Two images from the same spot, with HiLo Lens and without.
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I use HiLo with 645 pro. In the beginning I had the problem of disoriented photos. I was switching between Apps. Since I have been only using 645pro, I have not had any problems. Placing it in 90 degree orientation , along with Remote Shutter makes it much easier too take low angle photos.
 
Thanks Mik for posting this! I will inform MarkNZed of your feedback and have him respond. Keep sharing your photos with us and do not hesitate to contact us via our support with any problems! Cannot wait to see what you do next!
 
Hi Mike,

Thanks very much for the review. Feedback is always welcome!

You should not have to reset the orientation when returning to the app. Could you connect with me on the support channel to follow up on that - I'd like to understand how to reproduce the problem. As Gillian mentioned, contacting us at [email protected] helps if you want us to resolve specific issues because there is a tracking system behind the support email.

I can reproduce the problem with the saving of rotated images. iOS keeps advancing and unfortunately that breaks some things :( In this case the app had a bug and a more recent release of iOS has made it visible. I think we have a fix for the next release.

The camera roll in the HiLO Lens app only shows photos that were taken with the HiLO Lens app on the same device.

Having 645 pro and Pureshot support the HiLO Lens was a big win for us.

Cheers,
Mark
 
Mark
It would be helpful , if you have a fix to put it up, unless your next update is near. Meantime, I will deal with 645 pro and rotated or mirrored images. Very useful lens!
Mike
 
Hi MarkNZed, thanks for your help. You've my apologies. Because the orientation reset issue is no issue. I had the "show help" option turned on and at any time when I returned to the app, the help screen overlay comes up and I misinterpreted that as a request to set up orientation again. Sorry, my fault.
 
Hi Mik,

We were very lucky and Apple pushed through the latest app release very quickly. So you can update the HiLO Lens app

The battery drain should be "fixed" because the new Viewfinder Lens Correction option is disabled by default - the lens distortion is always corrected for saved images.

If you could edit your review at the top of this thread that would be great. as we've hopefully resolved the issues you raised.

Cheers,
Mark
 
MarkNZed, thank you very much for the update. I'll look into it and edit my review to match my new experiences.
 
MarkNZed,
I assume this update does not effect 645 Pro and the HiLo lens, will Mike be doing an update
Mike
 
Hi MarkNZed, I am not able to edit my review, there isn't any option to do so any more. It seems, that after some time, the option is hidden. Maybe Venomator can do something about this. :)

For this I write my new impressions here:

HiLo Lens app:

UPDATE (28th July 2014) There was an update of the app to version 1.7. This will change my review. They changed the behaviour of the straighten photo function. Now a photo will always be straightend at the time of the shot. The setting you can switch on or off now is "viewfinder lens correction". This means a live prewiew of the straightened photo and this is causing some heavy action in the device resulting in heat and battery drain. Now this function is turned off by default. As mentioned before, you photos will be straightened anyways. So this is a very good point.

If you are unsure about these settings, I recommend to set the app to it's default settings. You can do so in the app by clicking on the gear icon on the bottom right and scroll down the list to the option "Restore defaults". Switch it on, click on "Done" on the top right and tap the home button. On the homescreen tap on the app again and the app opens in a default state.

I already pointed out that I was wrong regarding "set orientation". You don't have to set it everytime you start the app. The app stores your last setting until you change it. I got fooled by the help screen that shows every time you start the app. You can turn off the help screen in the settings if you want.

A small improvement is in the in-app camera roll. After you rotate an image and tap the tick mark, you see a "save" message and then the message disappears. In the last version you then were sort of stuck. Only the Cancel button was
functioning. Now it's a bit better but not very much. After rotate and save, you can't either press the rotate button again, nor the share button. Only button that works is the camera button. But (as a workaround) if you scroll left or right in your images, than you can use all the buttons again. For me this is no big issue and might be corrected any time soon.

So, all in all, great update. Thanks! There is more in the update I don't mentioned, please check for yourself.
 
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