The folks at OnePlus have been busy and by the looks of the recently leaked images of the OnePlus 6, it seems the phone is almost an identical looking handset to the iPhone X design with notch included. The invitation to the event on May 16th, 2018 for the unveil mentions “Live Life in Super Slow Mo”which we believe will be a 960fps slow-motion mode akin to that in the Galaxy S9 & S9+ or the Sony Xperia ZX2.
OnePlus has been one of the best performing handsets for Android users due to their use of the best components out there along with a streamlined ROM that does away with most bloatware on the main install. Users of these phones also routinely claim huge battery life due to the optimized nature of the background tasks. For Slow Motion, they have only been competitive on the mid-range but that will probably change if Slow Motion is a big feature on this new phone.→ Continue Reading Full Post ←
Linus Tech Tips is probably the most well-known hardware enthusiast show on the net today. You can find all sorts of cool geeky stuff tested, assembled and destroyed in some cases. This time it was the turn for Krontech.ca to get a visit from the Linus team which funnily enough is very close to them geographically in the vicinity of Vancouver BC, Canada.
There is a quick tour around the startup headquarters as well as a nostalgic look back at the prototype cameras that evolved in what we know today as the Chronos 1.4c which is capable of 1,502fps at 720p resolution and recently able to record in RAW 16bit DNG format which makes it professionally usable in any setting given an adequate amount of light.→ Continue Reading Full Post ←
It seems that the cellphone has once again taken no prisoners when it comes to the portable consumer camera. Casio which was probably the most influential affordable high-speed camera developer 10 year ago with the EX-F1 has now decided to retrench and effectively end their portable consumer camera development due to mounting losses with no clear path to profitability for the division.
The Japanese hi-tech company generated a loss of 500 million Yen (or $4.6 million U$) in the 2017 fiscal year for the division. They will effectively pull out of the market to stop the bleeding. It is quite sad to see a company that created the EX-F1 and the excellent EX-FH20 eliminate their entire consumer camera division. Could things have been different and could they have avoided the phone camera erosion that has obliterated the sales of most manufacturers? Our only thought would be that they did not innovate fast enough to remain competitive for the consumer to be a real alternative.→ Continue Reading Full Post ←
Last week the site The Information posted a piece stating the possibility of GoPro being bought out by Chinese electronics company Xiaomi which are the makers of the main competitor to GoPro in the same form factor with the Yi camera line. We liked the Yi 4k+ last year as it delivered pretty acceptable quality in 4k 60p in a GoPro like the body+enclosure design. We were not thrilled by the bit rates or the slow-motion quality but it was in the running for the best alternative action camera with a lower price.
If the rumors are true Xiaomi will be consolidating the Action camera market and improving the Yi camera line overnight by rebranding it to GoPro as the name might be just as valuable as the technology being acquired. Most of the current Yi camera products share the components with pre Hero 6 Black cameras like the Hero 5 Black as they were based on the Ambarella chips that GoPro used for a decade.→ Continue Reading Full Post ←
Huawei’s P20 Pro is a beautiful phone that merges the sleek design of the Samsung Galaxy series with the Apple front screen notch while not compromising in camera design with a 3 sensor + lens combo that may be the best camera solution on a phone yet. In fact, DPreview has an article on the stills camera performance here. They call it “the most innovative mobile device we have seen in quite some time” which is a tall order considering how good the competition camera’s like in the Pixel 2 XL, Galaxy S9 and the iPhone X have gotten.
What interests us, however, is the slow-motion mode which allows the phone to shoot a 0.25sec burst of 720p video at 960fps which is slightly above the time recorded by the Galaxy S9 and Sony Xperia XZ series of last year but still below the new Xperia XZ2’s 0.4 seconds at 720p this year. We were not impressed with the quality of either phone when it came to overall resolution and artifacts so we were skeptical about the Huawei P20 Pro since the start.→ Continue Reading Full Post ←
The Z Cam E1 which delivered excellent quality 4k footage from a tiny package and was able to do 720p 240fps frame rates “at less than ideal quality”, however, a new Rumor from 4/3 Rumors here shows a Twitter message that hints at a new Z E2 m4/3 camera that is able to do 120fps at full 4k resolution. If this turns out to be true it could yield further performance improvements in 1080p and 720p along with higher quality that could be usable.
As far as linear specs go a 120p 4k pipeline could in theory yield 480fps 1080p and 960/1000fps 720p without going out of spec. As we have come to know over the years, however, it is usually wrong to extrapolate these specs to the maximum possible metric as the sensor or memory could be bottlenecks that limit the performance. So this rumor could have some legs to it and NAB 2018 could be the show that makes 4k 120p a regular feature for cameras.→ Continue Reading Full Post ←
