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 ←
At the end of February right before the Pandemic really got going worldwide and when the world seemed a lot simpler, Fuji surprised us with the launch of the Fuji X-T4 APS-C 1.5x crop sensor body. It comes completely unexpected to the community of slow motion enthusiasts as the majority of cameras only support a maximum of 120fps with a few Panasonics doing 180p and only the GH5s doing 240fps 1080p.
What makes this camera different is the quality of the output at 240p which is far and above the king in the APS-C format and destroys the GH5s aliased image with a very good and detailed rendition of the scene with a codec strong enough to allow for enough detail and color to really push the format further than any EVIL mirrorless camera before it.→ Continue Reading Full Post ←
With all the COVID 19/Coronavirus news it seems out of place to fret over smartphone maker decisions. However, we have to mention the latest Sony smartphones which prioritize photo and video quality with one gigantic omission. All of the new lineup from Sony the Xperia 1 II, Xperia 10 II, and Xperia PRO 5G lack super slow motion features. Yes, the 960fps 1080p mode is gone and the only spec remaining is a paltry 120fps 1080p Full HD pseudo-slow-mo frame rate.
If you recall in years past, the Sony brand was incorporating their Motion eye™ technology which pairs a sensor with ultra-fast memory on the same package to allow for large datarates and super slow motion capture. In the lab, the phones were able to shoot up to 1000fps at full 1080p HD with excellent quality. What came out in the Xperia phones was a somewhat odd translation of 0.1 seconds recording time at 1080p 960fps/1000fps which came out to be extremely short and a kind of useless feature. Now that has been abandoned.→ Continue Reading Full Post ←
The team at Krontech.ca has been shipping the first units of the Chronos 2.1-HD 4/3″ Sensor high-speed camera to their customers and in turn, footage has started to become available online showing what this new super affordable 1080p slow-mo cam can do. We will be reviewing a unit in the future once the firmware is more polished and will give it a good spin to finally rank it in our camera guide.
At first glance, we have a very positive reaction to the footage shown. The noise control and per-pixel detail are excellent and a clear cut above what the much smaller 2/3″ sensor on the Chronos 1.4c was able to deliver. Larger sensors are a must for high-speed cameras to make use of more available light locations. We have gathered some excellent video examples that will let you have a pretty good idea of what you can shoot and at what quality level with this camera.→ Continue Reading Full Post ←
The recently announced Galaxy S20 phone line has been making some waves with impressive specs especially related to the camera modules. As always we are only interested here in the high speed video specs here at HSC “not even the new 8k video spec” and the new phones are an improvement over the S10 and Note 10 lines. However, it is important to note that not all S20s will share the same slow motion specs and that is what this post is about.
You may think that the S20 Ultra 5G will be the easy choice here but it is hardly as straight forward as that. The amount of technology packed in the Ultra phone along with four camera modules and one of them at over 100MP means they prioritized photo resolution over video shooting in their sensor selection. The Ultra will not natively support the 960fps spec but default to only 480fps.→ Continue Reading Full Post ←
