GoPro has released the Hero 9 Black and in many respects, it is the best camera they have ever made. It is a little larger to accommodate a slightly larger battery and screens and it offers a new 5k mode that is very filmic like with pretty good dynamic range. It has Hypersmooth 3 technology which does away with most gimbal situations and it can serve as a minute and reliable blog camera.
However, the GoPro Hero 9 Black is in some ways the end of an era for GoPro and the action camera market. It now heralds a new subscription model that aims to hook their market with a lower price for the camera if the subscription to GoPro.com is added at check out. Gone are the days of class-leading technology and in are the days of survival at all costs. Can we really blame GoPro for trying to make it?→ Continue Reading Full Post ←
Sony has been relatively quiet about phones since the Xperia 1 II roll out. However, rumors have been heating up on the Xperia 5 II, which is a lower-cost alternative to the flagship phone but very nearly as capable without the best screen or construction but not skimming on features. The latest rumor mentions a spec sheet that makes it a 4k 120fps recording phone which may show that handsets still are seen as innovators when it comes to cameras since very few consumer devices in the camera world can record at that frame rate.
We were not very happy that Sony basically killed the super slow motion mode on the Xperia 1 II phone which kind of showed that Sony was putting stills and regular video at the forefront without making compromises in sensors that needed to shoot at higher frame rates. Sony chose to do cleaner regular frame rate video and stills that were better than any Sony phone before at the cost of not having a do it all sensor. Slow motion from Sony was all but killed but the Xperia 5 II now makes us second guess that fate…→ Continue Reading Full Post ←
Samsung will start shipping to stores the Galaxy Note 20 and Galaxy Note 20 Ultra on August 21, 2020. This new phone is the latest and greatest on their line of ultra-performance devices that offer little compromise at a premium price. It has a 108MP sensor on an f1.8 lens on the Note 20 Ultra 5G version that can do crazy zoom and pixel averaging in low light. The more pixels you record even if they are small let you do more computational photography processing to average noise and artifacts out to end with a crisper lower resolution image that is pleasing and punches above it’s weight.
However, not all is good news since the video mode in Samsung devices when it comes to slow motion has been stalling in the last iterations to a max 960fps mode in HD 720p which is now on this phone an interpolated 480fps mode that is slowed 2x to 960p. This makes the Note 20 line an inferior slow-mo device to even the Galaxy S10 which offers real 960fps. The good thing here is a full second of recording at 480fps on the Note 20 line which translates to 16 seconds playback at 30fps and 32seconds with interpolation.→ Continue Reading Full Post ←
It’s here, yes it is finally here you are not seeing things. In what may be the most anticipated camera release in years, Sony has finally unveiled the a7s III video-centric mirrorless camera. It has all the new performance benefits of processing and AF seen on other Sony bodies but now applied to a 12 Megapixel back-illuminated full-frame sensor geared to shoot pristine 4k and be able to shoot stills as a secondary function. The original 5D from Canon shot 12.8 MP in 2005 when it was introduced and it is still being used out there by many professionals as it was and still is a wedding workhorse. However 15 years later which in the camera world seems like a century, we get a brand new Sony camera with 12MP and that is actually a great thing!
The slow motion on this camera has a lot of good but also some hidden secrets that you should know about before plunking your hard-earned cash. We get what may be the best 120fps 4k footage we have seen in any camera under 10k USD at full 4:2:2 10 bit quality which after looking at the samples left us with nothing but praise to see such a well-executed mode with the added benefit of being able to shoot nearly 1hr worth of it before the camera temperature spoils the party. Excellent performance!→ Continue Reading Full Post ←
Canon has now released the final specs and estimated release dates for the EOS R5 and R6 cameras. There is a lot of good advancement in features especially in video mode as what many believe is an afront to Sony and Panasonic who dominate video recording on ILCs. The R5 can record 24fps and 30fps 8k video or 8192 x 4320 pixels in RAW quality which is a staggering 1TB of storage or 2600 Mbits/s for only 51 minutes of recording time. That means that every hour you will eat up through a full TB of your RAID backup storage. We see this mode being transcoded to an intermediate format like Blackmagic RAW or BRAW or Apple ProRes as soon as possible.
There is more bad news, on the 120fps 4k front there is no other option of recording but All-I which saves every frame independently in 10-bit 4:2:2 which is good for excellent quality but at the cost of 1,880 Mbits/s which is 224MB/sec or 13,447MB / minute of recording time. Better get a ton of memory cards and hard drives ready!→ Continue Reading Full Post ←
Believable slow motion video samples on Youtube for phones and cameras are so confusing nowadays that you simply cannot rely on them unless it comes from a reputable source. The avalanche of fakes is so big that it makes it next to impossible to find the real ones out there. It also makes it extremely hard to choose a slow motion capable phone when the supposed videos you are looking at are faked from other devices or even professional slow motion cameras.
There is also the big problem of stealing real quality slow motion footage from other channels and using it in compilations that claim to be from a phone or camera in order to get clicks and views for quick revenue. The problem goes even deeper when these fakes overtake most other real videos due to the viral nature of their compilations as they usually look much better than anything these cheap devices they claim to represent can do. We examine a few cases that can educate you on how to spot these fakes!→ Continue Reading Full Post ←
