hi guys at the moment it seems pretty safe to expect at least a 3.2 mp cam in the new iphone,but can anyone explain the max reolution this couid possibly record at eg 720p or is it software software rather than hardware limitation many thanks
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a question about video recording
- Thread starter vinnyemmery
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Most 3.2mp cameras that record video do so at only 640x480. This is probably a hardware limitation though. Theoretically it should be able to shoot 720p depending on what the other hardware is. Someone with more expertise in this arena can hopefully chime in.
The limiting factor is the phone's processor.
First, imagine if you saved 30 still photos a second from the camera. Even at 640x480 you'd run into a GB of video within a few minutes. That's why video is heavily compressed, usually by comparing frames to each other and throwing out data that's the same from one fram to the next. The computer fills that data back in during playback. So you save hard drive space, but the trade-off is encoding time.
This means you need a powerful processor to play video back (and the iPhone can handle this) but an even more powerful processor to encode it in real-time or near-realtime.
So the question is, how good will the iPhone's processor be at doing that? My guess is that it can handle 640x480 video, but doing 1280x720 video would be too much work for it. In other words, if the iPhone shot HD, you'd shoot for 1 minute and then have to wait 2 minutes for it to save!
It's unlikely Apple would allow the video feature to work that way since people would consider it slow and worthless. So there probably won't be HD video recording on the iPhone until its processor gets faster in the future.
First, imagine if you saved 30 still photos a second from the camera. Even at 640x480 you'd run into a GB of video within a few minutes. That's why video is heavily compressed, usually by comparing frames to each other and throwing out data that's the same from one fram to the next. The computer fills that data back in during playback. So you save hard drive space, but the trade-off is encoding time.
This means you need a powerful processor to play video back (and the iPhone can handle this) but an even more powerful processor to encode it in real-time or near-realtime.
So the question is, how good will the iPhone's processor be at doing that? My guess is that it can handle 640x480 video, but doing 1280x720 video would be too much work for it. In other words, if the iPhone shot HD, you'd shoot for 1 minute and then have to wait 2 minutes for it to save!
It's unlikely Apple would allow the video feature to work that way since people would consider it slow and worthless. So there probably won't be HD video recording on the iPhone until its processor gets faster in the future.
I'd be surprised if the recording was anything other than 640x480 (with possibly an "MMS" option for 320x240 video).
The real bottleneck is the compression process - which is much more computationally intensive than playback. The Compressor has to search through a lot of pixel data looking for stuff they can throw away.
But if you look at something like the Flip Mino HD. - It is a small phone-like device *can* record 720p. All you need is the right chip.
I think if Apple were to add video, perhaps they'd pick 720p h264.
The quality could be stunning.
However, those files can be quite bulky - a megabyte gets you 3 seconds or so. A gigabyte get you an hour.
But if you wanted to mail or MMS the video - it would need to be scaled down to a smaller size.
C.
Hmm ... interesting.
I wonder. Well, the iPhone screen isn't quite 16:9 either, and the leaked screens seem to say that at least a little bit of the screen is lost to the 'control bar' at the bottom, making the viewfinder image even less "wide" (or tall I suppose, depending on the orientation).
You make a good point though - 4:3 in the world of 16:9 does seem a little archaic.
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Isn't the biggest bottleneck the NAND write speed?
Isn't the biggest bottleneck the NAND write speed?
so when the omina hd comes out is the processor in that more powerful than the iphone processor and hardware
The Omnia records 720p. We don't know what the iPhone will record yet. It won't be the CPU that does the compressing - but a dedicated chip.
C.
the omnia hd uses the omap3 processor (likely the same one found in the pre) and PowerVR SGX graphics technology.
we will have to wait and see what the next iphone has inside.