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whitedragon101

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Sep 11, 2008
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Does the phone just use a cropped portion of the sensor to shoot 1080p or does it use the whole sensor and group the pixels?

I.e does it do this
4K = 1 sensor pixel per displayed pixel
1080p = 4 sensor pixels per displayed pixel (i.e 4x more light)

If it groups the pixels it would be better in low light the lower the res.
 
Your frame rate matters more than anything.

I don’t know exactly how the capture or rendering is done on the sensor, but the difference is minimal (if anything at all). I would imagine that there is no funky scaling or anything hooky going on, so they should be similar in terms of low light performance assuming same frames per second. Theoretically, assuming that the pixel density increases at a lower resolution then sure, noise could be reduced.

The slower your frame rate, the more light you can capture. Stick to 24 FPS as often as you can in lower light. It’s the cinematic standard and makes for a smaller file size to boot.
 
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