Trying Out Hipstamatic’s W Mag Freepak & Related Issues

by Pu on August 22, 2012

I’ve been testing the new Hipstamatic’s W Mag Freepak that was released a few days ago. The pack contains three items, one film, one lens and one case. The W40 film features an irregular square black border, strong vignetting, high contrast and desaturated colors. The Wonder lens applies to photos taken with it muted cool tones. The W Mag Commemorative case combines a light wooden texture with sleek metal details.
Hipstamatic W Mag Freepak
Hipstamatic W Mag Freepak
Hipstamatic W Mag Freepak
The cool and contrasty look achievable with the W Mag pack is a pleasant addition to the Hipstamatic effects collection. However, other times I got warnings as soon as new packs were available in the in-app market, but not this time. I have not made changes to any of my settings in the last months and yet, while I was dowloading the new pack, I noticed that all my previous downloads were gone the app automatically requested that I restored my purchases. After restoring, a few of the items were still missing. I tried restoring again and again, but it didn’t help. All of the missing items were — luckily? unluckily? — free at the time of their original release.

RILA August 23, 2012 at 2:44 am

Hipstamatic, aka synthetic, is truly pathetic! Their customer service is one of the worst I’ve experienced in the app store.

Let’s take a quick look at all the apps they’ve delivered to date:

SwankoLab – Is a good app. But it’s orphaned and forgotten. Their loss.

IncrediBooth – Took 3 interations to enable the rear camera; however, instead of utilizing the available 5Mpx capabilities, the app only takes low-res pictures. Crapp!

D-Series – was bad idea from the start; the pay-per-roll virtual films and the FB likes to active cameras was very annoying and outrageous. Was probably positined as an FB enticer (how bootlicking is it to name a lens after Suckerberg). Anyways, people spoke and the app is now, thankfully, DEAD!

Hipstamatic – The vault concept with all those limited stock lenses and the filmrolls is all very silly. More frustating is the fact that these limited edition thingies, if dleeted, are not easily restored.

But for their D-Series fiasco and recently the layoffs – they never really figured in the news.

My guess is they wanted Hipsta to be taken over by FB. The instagram deal must have sucked wind out of their sails. The company won’t last long.

After 3 years of camera app development and iOS upgrades, there are better apps in the market today. Except for one blog which is apparenty run by one of their inner circle, no one talks about Hisptamatic anymore.

Time to move on.

Tim Lee August 23, 2012 at 5:00 am

SwankoLab was one of the biggest disappointments ever! I bought the subscription, little money I know, but could have used them for some other app >:( Synthetic is more into publicity than into apps, I assume.

Hipstamatic is also reaching the bottom. Restoring works once in five attempts, not everything is restored, I lost count of all the stuff I lost after deleting and restoring, so I’m not gonna bother anymore. The effects are OK, with some that are very nice indeed, but as the previous person said, there are soooo many other apps doing the same! Who cares anymore?

Instagram is so much better overall, at least it has some use. For taking photos with the iPhone there are so many other choices for much less. I’m not talking about money, but about the nuisance of aborted restoring, re-issues of old packs, and so on and so forth.

zerozero31 August 24, 2012 at 8:36 pm

… can’t say I’ve had any of the issues the posters above have had and Hipstamatic remains a go-to app for me if I want to do something different. Otherwise it’s ProCamera for me.

as for the film/lens in the WMag pack I use this combination quite a lot nowadays. I like the way it makes the images come out, probably more so than any of the other packs they’ve released so far. I can’t wait for the new Ben Lowy pack to come out!

Tucker August 31, 2012 at 7:17 am

Hipstamatic has it strengths and weaknesses. I personally love it. I love the simplicity of the app and that it encourages you to really consider your shot, which lenses and films to use before shooting and doesn’t require much apping in post but can also produce incredible shots when you are in a hurry.

They are actually very responsive via their twitter to technical difficulties. I had the exact same issue occur where some of my purchases wouldn’t restore. I contacted them via twitter and their support team directly via email. My issues were resolved in less than an hour. They had to reset something with their servers. So definitely do that if you lost any purchases.

I love the results you got with the new pak. I haven’t found a great use for it yet. But I know I will find some combos I like with the new gear.

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