DotMatrix Studio vs Inkling

Your photos, run through a monitoring terminal. DotMatrix Studio turns anything you shoot or import into a 1-bit artifact — the dot-matrix look of VFD displays, old newsprint and station monitors. There is no preset carousel to scroll past: you dial the look in yourself and watch it render live. SHOOT IN 1-BIT A live dithered viewfinder shows you the look before the shutter, not after. Toggle between DOTMATRIX and NORMAL if you would rather frame with the plain camera first, adjust pixel size and palette on the rail, and flip between front and back cameras. THREE FILM STOCKS NEWSPRINT — Floyd–Steinberg error diffusion, the fine scattered grain of a printed photograph. MATRIX — Bayer 8x8 ordered dithering, the regular weave of a hardware display. HALFTONE — real circular dots on a grid, with an adjustable cell size. All three are written by hand for this app and tuned by eye, not borrowed from a library. FOUR PALETTES OXBLOOD, PAPER, PHOSPHOR and AMBER. Each is a two-colour stock with its own accent, from warm terminal red to green phosphor glow. THE DIALS Virtual resolution, 80 to 480 pixels wide, is the chunkiness itself: drop it and the image breaks into big honest dots, raise it and the detail creeps back. Contrast runs -50 to +50. Halftone cell size is adjustable. Scanlines darken every third row. Press and hold the preview to peek at the original underneath. TELEMETRY FRAMES Five frames — ACQUIRED, STATION, SPECIMEN, REC, or none — stamp your artifact with instrument chrome: dates, dither codes, resolution readouts, and a caption of your own. Frame text is drawn at full export resolution, so it is never a pixel-doubled smear. WALLPAPERS Render your artifact at your device's exact pixel size as a lock and home pair, then set it from the Photos app. A LIBRARY THAT STAYS EDITABLE Saved artifacts are parametric: the source photo and every setting are stored together, so reopening one restores the whole editing session. Change your mind about a palette a month later and nothing is lost. EXPORT PNG at 2048px on the long edge. Save to Photos, share anywhere, save as a wallpaper, or keep it in the library. Saving and sharing record the artifact automatically, so an exported image is never a dead end. COMPLETELY OFFLINE There is no network permission in this app at all. No account, no sign-in, no analytics, no ads, no location. Your photos never leave your device, because there is nowhere for them to go.

Inkling is a small press that lives on your phone. Pick a photo and it comes back as a numbered print: the fluorescent inks of a Risograph, the graphic bite of a duotone, the coarse dots of newsprint, the heavy flood of a screen print. ■ LAYOUT Put a few photos, a few words and a doodle on one sheet and print them in one run: they share the same inks and dots, so the sheet comes out as one piece. · One to four photos: drag, scale and rotate; frame each as a rectangle, rounded corners, a capsule or a circle · Crop to a set ratio (1:1, 4:5, 16:9, 3:1…) to print just part of a picture · Four type styles; a pen in three weights, solid, dashed or dotted · Words and lines can use the accent ink or one of the photo's inks, printing on the same plate · Four templates (Two capsules, One day, Photo strip, Postcard) or freeform · Change paper, inks or process; layouts stay in the Press Room to edit later ■ WHY IT LOOKS PRINTED Two spot inks cannot reproduce what your camera saw, so Inkling stops trying. Rather than force a photograph into two colours, it works out how much of each ink to lay down and where. Highlights are left as bare paper. The lighter ink carries the midtones, the darker one sinks the shadows, and hue only nudges the split — enough that a brick wall leans pink and dusk holds blue. Giving up colour accuracy is what buys the style. Ink load then has to become something a press can actually put on paper: dots. Each plate gets a grid of them, tilted to a screen angle you choose, and every dot grows with the ink sitting under it. Bring two plates' grids too close in angle and they beat against each other into moiré. Inkling hands you the angle and the ruling and lets you decide whether that is a problem or the point. Every ink means another pass over the same sheet. One plate settles onto bare paper, the next presses over it, and because they are all see-through, anywhere two of them cover the same spot reads darker. The first plate lands true; the ones behind it sit a few pixels off, each along the heading of its own grid, the way rollers lose their grip over a long run. Here that slip is a slider, and most people push it up rather than down. ■ SMART RECIPES Pick a photo and it's already a print. Inkling reads the dominant colour and pairs the inks itself: orange for a sunset, pink for a pink wall, blue holds the night. The default is the one you'll want to share — and everything stays adjustable. ■ WHAT YOU CAN TUNE · 1–4 plates, each with its own ink · 12 official Riso spot inks · Screen angle 0–90°, set by turning a protractor · Screen ruling 10–90 lpi, set by dragging a ruler · Ink density 10–100%, set by filling an ink well · Plate shift, ink spread, paper tooth · Paper: warm white, natural, pure white, kraft · Sheet: ratio, margin, corner — with clean, stamp-perforated, deckle or punched edges ■ THE PRESS RUN Pressing PRINT doesn't just hand you a result. The first plate lands, a beat passes, the second presses down, the overlap darkens, it settles. Every run is a numbered print in a limited edition. ■ THE PRESS ROOM Every print you pull hangs on a wall — numbered, with its inks, paper and settings frozen in the file. ■ IMPOSITION Gang a few prints on one sheet: a dozen fixed grids, or a freeform collage — drag, pinch, rotate, reorder the stack. ■ RECIPE CARDS Turn a print's inks and screens into a card with a QR code. A friend scans it and prints their own photo with your recipe. ■ EXPORT · PNG for sharing · High-resolution PNG at full size, for printing · Separation PDF, one page per plate, with register marks and ink values — ready for a print shop · Animation, the second the last plate settles ■ ABOUT YOUR PHOTOS Everything happens on your device. Inkling has no network access, no account, no analytics, and collects no data at all. Turn off the network and nothing changes. ■ ABOUT THE PRICE Inkling Full is a one-time purchase, not a subscription. Buy it once and it stays yours.