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 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 ←
The Nissan GT-R continues to be unmatched in the high-end sports car world by offering a performance way above its price range. For the new NISMO GT-R 2020 they needed to film the car at full performance. After looking for solutions in the market it was immediately apparent that they needed a car with a rig system that could keep up with the new supercar.
As it turns out the only solution would be to build a custom GT-R with expert and Drifting world champion Mauro Calo, with camera rigs normally used in big Hollywood productions as you have seen in the Fast and the Furious series. Nissan decided to paint the car Matte black so it would not reflect on the other car’s paint and or create unwanted flares on camera lenses. The result is the best performing camera rig car ever made. It is capable of carrying a fully rigged camera system including but not limited to ARRI Alexa, RED Dragon, Sony Venice, Panasonic Varicam or high-speed solutions like the Vision Research Phantom Flex 4k.→ 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 ←
The Spanish Association of Broadcast, Cinema and TV Producers or PNBE for short, is sharing some information about a camera they are custom building for the purpose of shooting a new series for Spanish Television that explores Nature and Astrology “Or maybe Astronomy” which could be a translation error. The new camera will be able to shoot at pretty remarkable specs like 10k and 8k video including higher frame rates at many resolutions that surpass anything in its class.
The camera needs to have extreme detail and low light performance with RAW capabilities. Only a dozen will be built for the TV program but we assume they share the information in order to see if there is interest in the market for DPs and other professionals to own such a camera. We were happy to see that the spec sheet is very detailed with both H.264 and H.265 support aside from RAW and Cinema DNG formats in recording.→ Continue Reading Full Post ←
Today Google unveiled the heavily leaked Pixel 4 and Pixel 4 XL phones which have the latest and greatest camera module geared up for computational photography enthusiasts. It brings in the dual camera back design of many competitors and also drops the notch in turn for a thicker bezel which looks in our view better. The phone is sporting the latest Snapdragon 855, 6GB of RAM and up to 128GB of fast flash memory.
Sadly the phone is keeping the exact same high frame rate specs of the Pixel 3 of last year. So 240fps is staying at 720p and 120fps at 1080p is the max at that resolution. It is clear Google is not interested in delivering performance in high frame rates like their rivals in the Android space. Even Apple offers a much better 1080p 240fps spec which is offered on the back cameras with little trouble. Even the iPhone 11 bests the Pixel 4 in the Selfie department as it allows up to 120fps 1080p for (Slofies™) which is a prominent feature of the handset.→ Continue Reading Full Post ←
