There are a number of camera apps available on the App Store, Instagram is the hot one, Camera+ is the classic one, while my favorite one is PowerCam, the fun one.

PowerCam is a free camera app, which was first released in December 2011. The app had been downloaded 1 million times after only one week, and the number has reached 15 million after these few months. It has been the Top 1 Photo & Video app in tens of countries. It is so hot that Apple App Store put its big banner in the homepage to recommend it. I think people probably love PowerCam for the same reasons as I do.

PowerCam comes along with dozens filters and effects, some are artistic, some are cute, and some are just hilarious. I can’t help trying them out one by one, so much fun. But it’s still not the coolest part. The coolest part is all the filters and effects are real-time. You can apply instant, live filters and effects WHILE shooting, and you can see exactly what the final shot will really look like right now. Besides photos, the filters and effects can also be applied to live videos. I showed some of my recorded videos to video professionals, they told me that it is really hard to apply these effects to video afterwards, not to mention during recording. OK, I admit, I was proud.

All the effect stuff above is included in one mode. There are 3 more. In my opinion, each one can be separated and become a popular app itself. Color splash could subtract color from a background to highlight the focus of your shot.Tilt-shift lets you seemingly shrink down the world around to create miniaturized views of the everyday stuff. And Face Timer helps take your portrait easily and clearly with the advance face tracking technology.

Another fun you must enjoy in this app is to stitch multiple photos into single one with Collage feature before sharing. Layouts and frames are listed, tap to apply, tap to change, the creating process is already fun enough.

Images and videos can be shared easily across various platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Tumblr, YouTube, Sina Weibo, and more. You can do it in so many apps, but here, you only need one click to share to them all.

You can see how much I love this app because it has all the features I want and more, and it is doing great. I am still wondering why it is free, it can make big bucks with these awesome features. Well, I don’t think it will be free for long.

Try it out if you want