The Chinese company from Shenzhen OnePlus has always been regarded as a pusher and advancer of cutting edge technology at a price that is more affordable than most premium brands. The good news has always been that the lower price has not really made it a premium-less experience, actually, many of their phones are so advanced and feature-rich than many flagships from Samsung and Apple have trouble catching up in features like the 120Hz display refresh of the 7T last year.
Since the OnePlus 6 and 6T slow motion in 2018 made inroads by allowing 480fps 720p recording for an unheard of in the phone space “3.75 sec” recording time it has been one of the best slow motion phones to own. They repeated that feat with the OnePlus 7 and 7T in 2019. Now in 2020 after many pushed dates for announcement due to the pandemic situation they have now unveiled the OnePlus 8 and 8 Pro flagship phones. They are premium and advanced that compete head to head with the best out there. They also include 480fps and from the looks of the sample, it seems to be increased in quality with much less pixelation.→ Continue Reading Full Post ←
Last year the Huawei Mate 30 Pro was our slow motion phone of the year with its real 1920fps 720p with interpolated 4x mode to 7680fps and real 960fps at full 1080p. Now Huawei has again brought back the same performance with an even better optical system and what looks like better interpolation algorithms to the new P40 Pro and Pro Plus phones.
The phones have gathered little attention outside of China as Android cannot be updated and the Play Store is not accessible due to US restrictions on Huawei as a technology company that poses a risk to national security. Most of these phones are acquired by the use of importers or the pre-owned market and no US carriers offer them. Still, it is the amazing hardware design and the best slow motion performance on any phone to date that makes it impossible to ignore.→ Continue Reading Full Post ←
The iPad Pro has been making accessible the best iPhone Camera features for a few years now and the latest 2020 model seems to be in lockstep with the iPhone 11 Pro but with only 2 cameras instead of 3. However, the quality is close but not as good lens wise, but they make up with a new LiDAR scanner in place of the third camera lens that makes it possible to accurately scan physical objects and surroundings to improve AR capture and interaction. The demos are early but the technology holds promise.
What interests us at HSC is the slow motion features and we see a continuation of the iPhone 11 Pro and 11 camera modes with Wide and ultra-wide cameras supporting all slow-mo modes of 60, 120 and 240p which is identical to the mobile line up. We looked at the iPhone 11 Pro’s camera quality which impressed us with the best 240p and 120p quality on a phone to date see here→ Continue Reading Full Post ←
Quite a few of our readers have asked for HSC to comment on the rumors of a Canon R5 Mirrorless camera that according to unsubstantiated information claims 120fps at 4k and 8k at 30p. The R5 may be the modern non-DSLR successor camera to the EOS 5D Mark IV and could become a major release for the company for this decade. As rumors go we can probably believe some of it but we have to be skeptical on the full specs because Canon has not shown the willingness to push the envelope as far for many years and has calmy let Panasonic and Sony take the firsts spots on video features.
We would love to see Canon go ahead and push the envelope with amazing video features that can revive the platform for serious video production the same way the 5D Mark II did back in 2008 when it took the video world by storm and made it possible to shoot quality video that looked a lot like the 5D still images that have dominated certain segments of still imagery business like weddings.→ Continue Reading Full Post ←
2020 is already becoming a very busy year for camera releases. The CES Show this past week had a bunch of announcements in the professional, amateur and aerial drone markets that shoot high frame rates. We will try to cover the most useful cameras in the coming weeks. We want to start with the Insta360 ONE R Modular camera from Chinese company Shenzhen Arashi Vision Co., Ltd. which is a very interesting product that de-couples the sensor module from the body so you can interchange the actual imaging hardware on the fly for specific shots/jobs.
The real gem for slow motion fans is the 4K version instead of the 360 and or the 1″ version which both max out at 120fps 1080p instead of 200p. Many people will cry foul at the 200fps spec when GoPro and DJI do 240fps as do most slow motion capable smartphones but 200fps, if done well with the 100Mbps codec, could be a real diamond in the rough for your arsenal in action cameras.→ Continue Reading Full Post ←
Rumors surrounding the 2020 release of the OnePlus 8 phone are already heating up with a tentative May release date and a new camera module that can capture 960fps super slow motion at 720p, a clear step up from their previous phones at 480p. The OnePlus 7T can shoot 960fps but it is an interpolated mode from doubling the frames of 480p by 2x and doing the in-betweens in software.
What is interesting is that OnePlus since the OnePlus 6 has allowed for a full minute of playback in super slow motion from their 480p mode and has been one of the go-to phones for dependable slow motion capture that offers the longest recording time still to this day in higher than 240p modes.→ Continue Reading Full Post ←
