DJI has unveiled the Mavic Air 2 consumer drone with incredible specs and a fit and finish that rivals their more expensive lineup. We have been waiting for a successor to the original Mavic Air to see where the platform was taking high frame rates but while we now have a 240fps 1080p mode, it hardly what we would call usable for production. There is a softness and compression that while they look ok for amateur and some Youtube videos it fails for professionals that need that quality output.
There is a lot to like here like the 48MP sensor with 8k hyperlapse and stills mode with RAW along with a better than most other drones 4k UHD mode at 60fps with 120Mbps codec. It is really a steal if you were waiting for a drone that can do it all and not break your budget. You get many high-end features on a minute package that while a little big compared to mini drones, it is really small compared to the full-sized Mavic line.→ 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 ←
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 ←
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 ←
