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.
No way to play or access the video you supposedly recorded.
Developer Response
Check out our latest version, it’s a complete ground-up rewrite with tons of new features and many ways to export and share.
• Listening to music or a podcast? ASCII Camera no longer interrupts your audio just for opening the app — sound is only taken over when you actually start recording a video.
• Sharing a converted video is tidier now: exported files no longer linger and eat up storage after you're done sharing.
• Cancelling a video export stops right away and cleans up after itself.
• Performance and stability improvements, including lower memory use during long exports.
Thanks for using ASCII Camera! Found a bug or have an idea? Send us feedback anytime from the in-app menu.
Version 2.3
The developer, Alastair Bor, indicated that the app’s privacy practices may include handling of data as described below. For more information, see the developer’s privacy policy .
Data Not Linked to You
The following data may be collected but it is not linked to your identity:
Contact Info
User Content
Privacy practices may vary, for example, based on the features you use or your age. Learn More
Accessibility
The developer has not yet indicated which accessibility features this app supports. Learn More
Information
Seller
Ambor
Size
6.4 MB
Category
Photo & Video
Compatibility
Requires iOS 17.0 or later.
iPhone Requires iOS 17.0 or later.
iPad Requires iPadOS 17.0 or later.
Mac Requires macOS 14.0 or later and a Mac with Apple M1 chip or later.