Disposable camera vs phone camera

A disposable is a plastic box with a fixed lens, a roll of film and a flash. You can't zoom, focus or check the shot. Most hold a single roll of around 27 exposures, and when it's finished the whole camera goes off to be developed.

That sounds limiting, and it is. But the limits are the appeal: you shoot without looking at a screen, you take fewer photos, and the wait for the prints turns them into an event. The look is distinctive too: grain, warm colour, hard flash and the occasional happy accident.

• Good for: the feel of the thing, and photos you can hold.
• The cost: buying the camera, paying a lab to develop and scan it, waiting days or weeks, and a camera you can only use once.
• The risk: no way to know whether anything came out until it's too late.

A modern phone takes sharper, cleaner photos in almost any light, lets you check every shot, and has room for thousands of them. For documenting things, it's unbeatable.

The downside is the same as the upside. Unlimited shots and instant review mean twenty near-identical frames of every moment, a camera roll you never scroll back through, and photos that look like everyone else's.

• Good for: quality, reliability and capturing everything.
• The cost: nothing extra, but plenty of attention spent looking at a screen.

A disposable camera app sits between the two. It uses your phone's camera, so there's nothing to buy or post off, but borrows the parts of a disposable that change how you shoot: a limited roll, no checking each shot, a film look and a wait before you see the prints.

DisCam does this with rolls of 12, 24 or 36 shots (the free rolls have 5) and a choice of two modes. Disposable mode has you wind on before each shot and hides everything until you develop the roll. Instant mode prints each shot as you take it and lets you watch it develop.

• A real disposable, if you want physical prints and don't mind the cost or the wait.
• Your phone camera, for anything you need to record properly: documents, receipts, the official group photo.
• A disposable camera app, when you want the disposable feel and look without the cost, the wait for the post, or the plastic.

You can't re-develop a disposable photo on a different film. In DisCam, with Keep originals on, you can change the film, frame or date of a print later, and with DisCam Pro you can even develop photos you took on your normal camera.