REZ

It's a camera. It just has a lot less pixels. And color. (A lot less of everything, really) But that's the beauty of it. Every photo ("crush") is 32, 64 or 128 pixels square. At 64 × 64 that is 4,096 pixels, which is not enough room for much detail - so the camera has to make some of the decisions for you. Once you wrap your head around the absurdly limited resolution, then there is the color. 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. Sounds awful. For some reason it works. It's cute, in a metal kind of way. WHAT YOU CONTROL • RES - 32, 64 or 128 pixels square • PALETTE - 36 of them, from fairly ordinary to absolutely wild • COLORS - anywhere between 2 and 256 • DITHER - 10 ways of filling the gap between two colours • MOTION - 13 temporal effects. Some still, some play. tldr: a GIF. The viewfinder shows the crushed picture live, so what you see is what you get. THE FEED Crushes land in a feed in the order they were taken. No ranking, no algorithm, nothing suggested, and nothing is tracked about what you look at. You follow people or you don't. Simple. Everybody, even advertisers and businesses, 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 device from a company named after a fruit. YOUR OWN PALETTE. YOUR OWN RECIPE. You get one palette of your own, named after your handle. Mix it by hand, or lift it off a crush you liked. It travels inside every picture shot with it, so anyone who sees one can shoot in it too. Recipes (the resolution, palette, dither, etc.) can be shared via QR code instant copy to other users, or via any messaging app. WHY? Sometimes, limiting hardware makes humans more creative. 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. Take a normal photograph. Throw most of it away. Add some weird colors. See what happens.