ASCII Camera

Your camera. Reimagined as ASCII art.

ASCII Camcorder transforms your live camera feed into real-time text art; and records it. Point it at anything: the result is something no filter can produce.

THE HEADLINE FEATURES

COLOUR MODE

Not monochrome. Every character is rendered in the true colour sampled from that exact spot in the frame. The result looks like nothing else on the App Store.

LIVE ASCII VIDEO

Hit record. Walk around. Every frame of footage is rendered in ASCII as you shoot; motion, depth, light; all translated into characters. Export as a standard video file and share it anywhere.

INSTANT PHOTO CAPTURE

Freeze any moment as an ASCII image. Print it. Frame it. It's art that also happens to be text.

GPU-ACCELERATED RENDERING

Built on Metal. The conversion is smooth and immediate; no lag, no dropped frames; even with the largest character sets and finest zoom levels.

CHARACTER SETS

Nine distinct sets give you complete creative control:

• Standard: the classic, clean ASCII look

• Dense: maximum detail, 70+ characters from space to @

• Simple: stripped back, graphic, bold

• Blocks: Unicode block elements for a pixelated edge

• Braille: 256-dot-pattern characters, uniquely textured output

• International: a world first: Greek, Hebrew, Katakana, and Ukrainian Cyrillic characters interleaved and sorted by visual density, so every brightness level draws from all four writing systems simultaneously. The result is genuinely unlike any other ASCII art.

• Katakana: full halfwidth katakana, sorted by ink density

• Hebrew: 28 characters, perfectly density-ranked

• Greek: classical alphabet, sorted for accurate brightness mapping

• Ukrainian: Cyrillic alphabet, density-ranked for accurate tone reproduction

COLOUR THEMES

Classic green terminal glow. Amber CRT warmth. Cool electric blue. Clean white. Custom or full per-character colour mode. Colour is a creative choice, not an afterthought.

FULL CREATIVE CONTROL

• Adjust font size, zoom, contrast, and brightness live; changes are instant

• Switch character sets and colour on the fly while recording

• Front and rear camera with real-time switching

SHARE EVERYWHERE

• Export ASCII videos as standard .mov files (H.264, audio included)

• Share ASCII photos to any app (.JPG or .PNG)

• Export as RTF; paste formatted ASCII art into any document, email, or notes app with your chosen font and colour preserved

• Export as TXT; paste into any app that accepts text

• Print directly from the app; makes remarkable wall art

CLEAN AND PRIVATE

No ads. No subscriptions. No account required. Camera access only. Nothing leaves your device unless you share it yourself. All processing happens on-device.

Optimised for iPhone and iPad. Requires iOS 15 or later.