Update 9/10/2015: It is confirmed that the iPhone 6s has 2GB of RAM which is twice that of the previous iPhone 6 release. The iPad Pro has a large 4GB of RAM as confirmed today also!
Now that the dust has settled with the Apple keynote announcements over it is time to examine what the new iSight camera of the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus can do when it comes to recording video and Super Slow Motion.
Warning: The parent company of FPS cameras “The Slow Motion Camera Company Ltd.” went out of business and entered liquidation proceedings. No further development of cameras is expected. More information here on Google Search!
The creator of the fps1000 camera Graham Rowan carved out some time to answer a few questions posed by our readers and us about the upcoming camera release and what went into the development. The answers are thorough and paint a good image of what the process from idea to build has been like; along with pitfalls and industry insights. The interview is a bit long so grab a donut plus coffee and dig in!
The newly announced Canon ME20F-SH Camera besides it’s overly unpronounceable name and a price tag of $30,000 USD has what could be a record for any sensor to date. The ISO 4 million mark on this camera/sensor is able to record footage in full color at night. It over exposes footage only lit by a full moon. The Sony A7s last year was a revelation of where sensor technology is going with it’s close to 1/2 million ISO at 409,600 . It could shoot in near complete darkness and could do a good job at it. What Canon has done with the ME20F-SH is build their peak sensor technology into a 35mm Full Frame Sensor but with only 1080p Full HD resolution. The Sony A7s can shoot 4k footage with the HDMI output on an external recorder. This makes the pixel size on the Sony more constrained even with a Full Frame Sensor.
The pixel pitch size on the Sony A7s (12MP on a full frame CMOS Sensor) is around 8.4 µm; in contrast the new Canon ME20F-SH has a 19 µm pixel size in a Full Frame Sensor. This is an amazing performer in low light and probably the most sensitive sensor ever made for commercial purposes. At 2.26 Megapixels this is the state of the art for large pixels with impressive dynamic range and low light. It is unclear how the low resolution in such a large sensor will behave when it comes to moire and aliasing artifacts.
Today has been quite busy in portable device land with the release of the Moto X, Moto G and the One Plus 2 handsets. The hype and rumors regarding slow motion modes on these phones turned out to be way ahead of the norm and what we are left with is the same tired old specs of yesteryear when it comes to slow motion performance. 720p at 120fps seems to be the norm for an afterthought slow motion feature. Apple for example continues to up the ante with 240fps and possibly more in the upcoming iPhone 6s refresh. There is nothing wrong with these phones but if you want slow motion performance in your portable handset, the latest Moto and One Plus 2 are not what you would consider optimal. They however offer pretty good feature sets and great cameras for normal video applications and still capture.
The One Plus 2 is a phone flagship design for less money than you would normally pay for such a device. it has a modified Android OS “Cyanogenmod” that is fast, free of bloatware and very good with battery life. It has optical image stabilization, large pixels for a 13 megapixel sensor, fingerprint sensor and a great alert switch so you can deactivate alerts in a custom way when you are sleeping, in a movie theater or simply want to disconnect for a while. It is a lot of phone for the price. Even the One Plus 1 is still used in benchmarks today as a competitive phone in the mid range.
Warning: The parent company of FPS cameras “The Slow Motion Camera Company Ltd.” went out of business and entered liquidation proceedings. No further development of cameras is expected. More information here on Google Search!
The awaited update on the status of the fps1000 cameras has been posted on the Kickstarter page and once again it is twisting things up a bit by adding things, improving others and fixing some issues. The most important part of the update relates to what most backers are interested in which is the ship date and this update also starts to set a near time frame for building the first cameras and shipping them as soon as August 2015. While this date can move as it has in the past it seems that the hurdles for getting the improved from original design camera to buyers hands have been surmounted. It will be interesting to see how these cameras perform once in the field and what the software is like.
Panasonic introduced this week the Lumix DMC-FZ300 splash and dust-proof FZ200 super zoom successor. It is a mild refresh of it’s previous incarnations which keeps the 24x Optical; 25-600mm equivalent constant aperture F2.8 zoom lens and it’s 12MP Live MOS sensor and 5-axis hybrid IS . It does have a new Venus engine processor, added DFD Autofocus, better high ISO and 4k video.
High Speed Video enables recording subject with fast motion at 120 fps (NTSC / HD) 720p or 240 fps (VGA) 480p, while Time Lapse /Stop Motion Animation are also available.