Your at a party, like a wedding reception, and there are those little colorful cardboard boxes that contain disposable cameras. You pick one up, snap a couple pictures of friends or family, and sit the camera back down. At the end, the people that put the party on take all the camera’s in to have the film developed and enjoy the many happenings around the room they didn’t see.

Hipstamatic, the makers of the retro film/lens camera app, is trying to give that experience through the iPhone without having to leave your iPhone on the table. The app, Hipstamatic Disposable, lets you share ‘rolls of film’ with other iPhone owners to snap their images with.

The Hipstamatic Disposable uses ‘cameras’ that are similar to their retro app. Each camera has it’s own stylized filtering so images taken with it have their own look. The free app comes with three cameras already built that you can use as long as you like. A limitation of these ‘built-in’ cameras are they shoot at 600×600. There is the ability through an in-app purchase to create other effect cameras and to move the resolution up to over 2000×2000.

Now things get a little controversial. Hipstamatic Disposable is getting a lot of attention, good and bad because the sharing experience requires you literally buy the digital roll of film. Upon purchasing the film through the app (sold by how many images can be taken on that roll of film), you share the roll out to friends and the Hipstamatic Disposable app on their iPhones so they can shoot images to add to the roll you purchased.

OK, back to the fun. The camera can be customized with ‘stickers’ that you use so you could have a camera look just for an event. Also, there is a slider next to the shutter button to adjust the amount of the effect that is applied to the image being taken. The viewfinder within the Hipstamatic Disposable camera app is similar to the Hipstamatic Camera app, it’s smaller than the whole screen and shows a slightly distorted image of what your final image area will contain. When a picture is snapped, no one can see it till the whole roll is shot, like the old plastic disposable cameras that required developing when done. Each image is actually being stored up on Hipstamatic’s cloud server. When the roll is used up, which is saying all the shots available in the roll of ‘film’ you purchased, the images are available to view. You can then share the roll out to others on the usual popular social networks.

Will I use it? Do I hate the idea of having to buy single use ‘film’ every time? Will it be a hit like their Hipstamatic Camera? All of these are best answered by the situation where an image needs to be snapped. My first thought is that I hate the idea of buying a single use image over and over again. But, I can imagine times when it would be fun for pulling a bunch of friends together via the app to share an event. I can see using Path for a similar type of experience too though. Not an app I will use daily, but it might show up at get togethers for a fun time so I will play with the ‘Disposable‘ app just to make sure I’m ready if someone hands me a roll of their film to shoot from my area of the party.