CES brought a lot of weird tech like smarter toilets, personal companion robots and the occasional wearable smart tech that you really can’t wash in your home. As it is always the case at HSC we were looking for slow motion capable cameras and sadly we saw very little at the show. We are now showcasing three manufacturers who had 120fps Full HD cameras announced at the show and no frame rates above that.
These are primarily 4k 30 and 60p cameras that have a 1080p 120fps mode as a feature that no new camera can really ship without. Sony has already standardized this format in the last few years on most Alpha cameras and Panasonic has even gone above at 180fps and 240fps in some cases like the GH5 and S series. The cameras presented here are mainly either stills full-frame beasts or more standard video camera like. By 2020 we would have hoped to see better than 120fps 1080p on cameras of this caliber but it seems we will have to keep waiting…→ 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 ←
This year we have decided to have a special post to highlight the advancements in smartphone camera systems that allow the recording of super slow motion video. We have seen after all huge advancement this year especially by Asian companies making their best efforts to exploit the camera module’s strengths without crippling them to sell a newer model. The Chinese have decided to create a camera war between phone builders that one-up each other every few months.
We value image quality just as high as frame rate and when phones claim to be 1080p in high frame rate modes we usually find that the real case if 720p or similar upscaled to full HD 1080 with artifacts and jagged edges that can make you dizzy. But not all phones are created equal and that is where this list of the best of 2019 comes in. If by any chance an even stronger contender comes in before the end of the year we might revise this list but it would be a fluke.→ 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 ←
The Huawei Mate 30 Pro has been out for a few weeks outside the US, mainly in China and India and we have gathered 15 video samples from its slow motion mode which as of today is the best performing high-speed phone ever developed. We had some shortcomings about the way the phone reaches the highly hyped 7,680fps mode which is 1920fps multiplied by 4x in software from a small snapshot of the video memory.
We also had some suspicions that the 1080p 960fps mode was also interpolated but looking at the samples we gathered it seems that was a premature call. The phone is actually capturing the full frame rate at 1080p or close to that. The real max mode is 1920fps at 720p which is then interpolated to 7,680fps with good success by the new Kirin 990 chipset. Your mileage may vary and the results depend on the subject matter more than anything as organic slower motion looks much better than fast unpredictable bursts that break the interpolation algorithm.→ Continue Reading Full Post ←
Now that Apple’s latest and greatest phone the iPhone 11 and 11 Pro Max have been out in the wild for a few weeks, it is time to revisit the performance of the slow motion video mode of this all-encompassing handset. The iPhone has always been a good slow mo performer but the new cameras and bigger lenses with more advanced processing gave us high hopes for increases in video quality and fewer artifacts.
The slow motion quality should be better across both the 11 and 11 Max since they share essentially the same system of optics and bionic chip. Quality must be identical except for the two or three camera configurations. One thing that separates the iPhone is that you can shoot slow motion in all cameras and not just in the standard wide like Samsung or other Android phones. This is one thing Apple wins in spades and we hope to see other manufacturers adopt as standard.→ Continue Reading Full Post ←
