Spool now works with VoiceOver from loading a roll to developing it. Every dial, wheel and focus rack is adjustable: swipe up or down to step one detent, with the same click you feel when you drag. After each release VoiceOver tells you which frame you exposed and when the next one is ready, and it calls out the end of the roll and a Bulb exposure opening and closing. Turn on Increase Contrast and the engraved captions, hairlines, etched horizon and meter crosshair get brighter and heavier. With the setting off, the camera looks exactly as before. At the larger accessibility text sizes, touch and hold the frame counter, the exposure readout or the Bulb timer to see it enlarged. The distance unit switch is easier to hit, and its letters stay where they were.

Spool is built for iPhone Duo. Open the phone flat and the 4×5 ground glass runs the full height of the screen between two flanks: the lens turret and a focus rack you drag on the left, knurled aperture and shutter dials and the release on the right. Set it down like a laptop and the glass stands at eye level while the focus dial, meter, shutter dial and aperture collar lie flat under your thumbs, with the table holding slow speeds steady. Hold it like a book and the finder and the deck sit on either side of the fold, with nothing on the crease. The cover becomes the front of the camera. The person you photograph sees an ivory-framed 4×5 mirror, a countdown on a 3 or 10 second timer, the cues you send, and a thank-you card after each frame. Turn the mirror off and the cover shows the Spool nameplate. Loading a roll uses the hinge: drag the leader across the fold onto the take-up spool, then close the phone to seal the chamber. After you develop, the same poses become a darkroom, with the contact sheet on one side and the frame at full size on the other. The lens turret matches iPhone Duo's cameras at 13, 26 and 52 mm, and the app icon is tuned for the new Home Screen appearances.

iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max are supported. Both get the full four lens turret at 13, 24, 48 and 100 mm, the same as iPhone 17 Pro. The volume buttons are more honest as a shutter release. They rely on the system volume being recentred after every press, and when that stopped working they went quiet with nothing on screen to explain it. Spool now checks after each press and tells you what happened, so a volume limit you can fix reads differently from a release path that is not working. Built against iOS 27. Older code paths that iOS 18 made unreachable are gone.

The film drawer now tells you what a stock is for before you commit twelve frames to it. Pick a carton and you get the light it was made for, the tone it gives you, and how much room it leaves you if the exposure is off. Your first roll walks you through the three things nothing on screen explains by itself: the focus ruler, what the meter is telling you, and the crank. Each hint goes away the moment you do the thing. You can bring them back from Settings whenever you want. Loading is faster the second time. Once you have wound a roll in by hand, the loading screen offers to take you straight to frame one. The camera answers you better. The shutter now has the two-part kick of a leaf shutter, the finder blacks out for an instant as the blades close, and the crank glows while a frame is sitting there waiting to be wound on. On the contact sheet the pencil note at the bottom lists everything you have marked, not just the first one, and the rings are drawn at their own angles the way a hand draws them. Reduce Motion is respected throughout.

Cinema 800 has been rebuilt around the thing that makes tungsten cine film recognizable at night: the way bright lights bleed. Streetlights, neon signs, headlights, and hard reflections now spill a warm red glow into the frame around them. The glow sits around the light rather than washing over it, so a bright sign keeps its own color instead of going orange in the middle, and the rest of the picture holds its brightness. The stock is also balanced cooler, for the indoor and street light it was made for, so night scenes keep their blue rather than drifting yellow. Grain is a little heavier and now carries a hint of color, the way color film grain actually does. Every other film is unchanged.

Rebuilt the light meter for difficult scenes. It reads from the center of the frame, updates ten times a second, and settles faster when you swing from dark to bright. The deck now says what the meter is doing. A reading is marked held while the shutter is locked, and the deck states plainly when a reading has gone stale or the meter is unavailable instead of showing a number it cannot stand behind. The needle hides rather than resting at center when it has nothing to report, and flags UNDER or OVER past four stops. The EV readout now shows true photographic stops rather than render-scaled stops. Fixed a tap-to-expose point being reset to the center of the frame a moment after you set it. Fixed the meter carrying a stale reading across a lens switch, a session restart, or an interruption. Every frame now records the meter reading taken at the moment of release.

Added 1/1000s shutter speed support. Retuned 12 film stock profiles for cleaner skin tones, smoother highlight roll-off, and refined grain texture.

Fixed a crash that could occur when opening a developed roll. Contact sheets now load faster and use less memory.

Reportage 400: finished JPEG grain is quieter and more print-like.

Spool opens with a proper launch mark while the camera body comes awake, then returns you straight to the finder when a roll is already loaded. Film load now shows clear progress instead of sitting silent, lens changes keep the ground glass live, and a missed exposure no longer leaves the shutter stuck. Same twelve-frame ritual, steadier from cold start through the next frame.

Since the last release: • Modern render recipe v4 — tack-sharp from f/5.6 up: no simulated depth of field at mid and stopped-down apertures, zero field-curvature softness, stronger microcontrast and luminance sharpen, lighter grain and halation. Vintage keeps soft wide-open falloff and full film texture. • Taking-lens depth of field — blur and softness now follow the selected rear lens and dial aperture, not a fixed mid-tele assumption. • Zone scale on the focus ruler — while you rack focus, near/far distance bands update for the active lens and aperture. Finder stays sharp; drag-rack remains the focus method. Privacy: spool.camera/privacy · Support: spool.camera/support