It's a camera.
Just a lot less pixels.
And colors.
(a lot less everything, acutally)
But that's the beauty of it. Every photo is 32, 64 or 128 pixels square².
At 64 x 64, that's 4,096 pixels, which is not enough room for much detail, so the camera has to make some of the decisions for you.
Choose from over 16 REZ approved palettes, or create your own.
The premise
It sounds like a terrible idea.
For some reason it works.
Once you wrap your head around the absurdly limited resolution, then there is the colour. Instead of trying to reproduce everything that was actually there, REZ crushes the photo into a handful of colours the scene may never have had.
Sometimes that is a fairly normal-looking set. Sometimes it is IRONBOW or INFRARED, and your local bus stop comes back looking like something off a weather satellite.
The viewfinder shows the crushed picture live, so what you are framing is in fact the actual photograph rather than a preview of one.
The crushes
Cute, in a metal kind of way.
Crushes can be exported directly from the app, with an optional added border giving credit to the maker, and the recipe used to make it.
Fun fact: All sixteen crushes above, together, are smaller than a single photo from the phone that shot them. About 60x smaller, actually.
What you control
Five pivots that make a crush.
| Axis | Values | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| RES | 32² · 64² · 128² | How many pixels there are. 64² is 4,096 pixels. |
| PALETTE | 32, in 6 families | The group of colours the photograph is allowed to be made of. |
| COLORS | 2 → 256 | How many color stops the current palette has access to. |
| DITHER | 10 | How the gap between two palette colours is filled. |
| MOTION | 13 | What a second exposure does. Some are still, some play. |
By the numbers
A photograph you could send over a modem.
Motion
Animated GIFs.
Take two captures at a defined amount of time apart. Interlace them. Alternate pixels between them. The effects are endless and possibly the single best thing about the app.
Thirteen things a second exposure can do. Some hold still, some play.
The Feed
Giving it to you straight.
Posted crushes land in the feed in the order they were taken. No ranking, no algorithm, nothing suggested, and nothing recorded about what you look at (although we do have a most liked crushes section). You follow people or you don't.
Everybody using the REZ camera, even advertisers, are working with the same few thousand pixels, so nobody's photo is better because their phone cost more, or because they have the latest flagship from a company named after a fruit.
Your own palette
One set of colours.
Named after you.
You get one palette of your own, named after your handle. Mix it by hand, or copy it off a photo you liked.
It is branded inside every picture shot with it, so anyone who sees one can copy and shoot in it too. A shared photograph carries your handle along the bottom and the recipe down the right, so the way a picture was made is never a secret.
Why
Take a normal photograph. Throw most of it away.
You start taking photos differently, because you know the camera can't capture everything. Shapes become more important. Light becomes more important. You start looking for things that will survive being crushed down to a tiny square.
See what happens.
Open testing
REZ is in open beta on Android.
The camera, the palettes, the feed, all of it. Testing is open to anyone with an Android phone and a Google account. User handles are limited, so grab yours now!
Support
Something broken, or an idea?
Email goes to a person, not a ticket system. Bug reports from beta testers are genuinely useful, especially ones with a phone model attached.
The paperwork