There’s some buzz right now about the iPhone 3G S and other phones being capable of 720p recording, or perhaps even 1080p if they use the newest sensors. Wow! The future is here! 720p video built right into your phone! But here’s the thing: would you rather have HD video recording implemented very badly, as it must be with the limitations of mobile phones, or would you rather not have it at all and have space for more battery or RAM? Because there’s no way that video is going to be watchable.
Due to space limitations, you’re going to have a crappy lens. No one expects any kind of serious glass on a mobile, but the reason no one really cares is because the images and video are bad to begin with and low resolution to boot. The more resolution you get, the more you’re going to see distortion, scratches, and so on.
The sensors used may be state of the art, but they’re also tiny. That means that the photosensitive wells are going to be small, crowded, and over-amplified to make up for the lack of light. This means you’re going to see lots of noise, bad color and smearing of details. A slow electronic shutter will mean weird, wobbly motion. Exposure will be spotty and low light performance will be murder.
Lastly, the encoder and space required are just not going to be enough. You don’t get good video quality and small file size, period — it’s still just not an option right now. Highly compressed video looks like crap out of the gate, and it looks even worse after you’ve edited and exported it. They’ll overcompensate for lack of keyframes and motion tracking by oversharpening. Don’t want to compress it too much? You’ve only got a maximum of 32GB of space and you probably want some room for, I don’t know, TV shows and music and stuff.
Someday we’ll have it, but right now the limitations on the technology are just too much. Trust me, if they enabled it right now on your 3G S, you’d switch back to 640×480.
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