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I don't think in the end anybody particularly cares who came up with a new thing first -- it's more important who does it best and makes it the easiest to use. Remember before the iPod how there was the Creative Nomad, and the Archos Jukebox and so on? No, nobody does.
I had a Creative Nomad :D
 
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When they first announced the live photos thing it reminded me of Data's hologram/picture thing of Tasha Yar, where its kind of like a picture but there's a few seconds of movement.

Sounds like a fun feature, not something I would trade my 6 in for right away for a 6s, but something I would definately use.
 
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Thanks for this explanation. So to make it perfectly clear: I first use a 3D force touch to trigger the recording, and then I capture the actual picture with another press on the capture button? So I have to press twice, once hard and once "normal"? Looking forward to try this out in our local Apple Store once it will be available in Switzerland.

The recording begins as soon as you enter the camera app, i.e. anything that is displayed on the screen as a preview is temporarily stored until it becomes 1.5 seconds old, then gets dropped. Once you hit the button it takes the full picture, retains the buffer, and records an additional 1.5 seconds of video. As stated above this is how most DVRs work, which is why you can hit record after starting to watch a show.
 
I don't get how its only twice the size as one pic. If its 45 images, at 15fps, then wouldn't it be 45 times the size?
  1. The jpeg in this 'Live Picture' is stored at its full 12 MP resolution (which is roughly the resolution of 4K video, different aspect ratio though), the video data is stored only at something similar to 720p video. The precise ratio between the jpeg and mov resolutions is 17x. That alone cuts down that factor of 45 to about 2.6x.
  2. Additionally, video compression is far more effective than compressing each frame as a jpeg. It essentially only needs to store the changes from frame to frame (after storing the initial frame), if some pixels don't change or change only little that saves a lot of space (a static background and a static camera thus can reduce the size of movie file a lot). And there are many more compression tactics that rely like JPEG compression(JPEG compression records the colour information in a lower resolution than the brightness information) on the human inability to notice certain things (like reducing the bit depth of colour).
 
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Thanks for this explanation. So to make it perfectly clear: I first use a 3D force touch to trigger the recording, and then I capture the actual picture with another press on the capture button? So I have to press twice, once hard and once "normal"? Looking forward to try this out in our local Apple Store once it will be available in Switzerland.
I don't believe so.

Turn on live photos mode once. Then the phone is always recording the loop without any user action. When you take a photo in the usual manner, it is stored as both the "live" and "still" images.
 
Too bad they can't be viewed in their full glory anywhere else outside iPhone.

If you read you will see that they can, but, on specific devices with specific OS's. Again OS X 10.11.x El Capital, iOS 9 and WatchOS 2.

OS X is on a computer, iOS can be on iPad/iPod touch (not sure yet how it would work on the iPad/iPod touch but they do show an iPad in the poster) and WatchOS is the Apple Watch.. so 2 out of 3 are not iPhones.
 
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Reminds of the gimmick comments on MR right before Touch ID was released.
I don't see Touch ID or Force Touch as gimmicks. Both are hardware-based features which took a lot of time to develop, and make using the device quicker/easier.

Live Photos, however, is more on the software side, and I don't see it having as much of an impact as the two hardware features mentioned above. Simply a short video with a photo thumbnail, presented in a stylish manor.
 
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A couple of examples are 'Animated photo' and 'Sound and shot' which both debuted on the Samsung Galaxy S4 and Note 4 in 2013. Not very different from Live Photos, but no one saw the point of moving pictures - or pictures with sound - when you could just as well use the movie feature...
What is size of a three-second movie file [shot at the standard resolution setting of 1080p and 30 fps] compared to these 'Life Images'?
 
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Joanna Stern calling Live Photos "the best new feature" is enough for me to discount her review altogether (honestly, though, the rest of the review wasn't great either). I'll stick with good ol' Walt:

Joanna Stern is the most annoying "tech reviewer" ever. She really thinks she is funny, but, she's not. She tries, and fails. I wish WSJ would get someone else. She's just awful. I can't watch her stuff anymore. She's just too annoying.
 
Such an arbitrary limitation to the 6S to get people to upgrade. I bet some 14 year old jailbreak developer will get it enabled on earlier devices.

But! It's cool nonetheless. Will play with it on my inevitable iPhone 7 =)

There isn't anything hardware-wise keeping previous gens from doing it, is there?
 
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I don't see Touch ID or Force Touch as gimmicks. Both are hardware-based features which took a lot of time to develop, and make using the device quicker/easier.

Live Photos, however, is more on the software side, and I don't see it having as much of an impact as the two hardware features mentioned above. Simply a video with a photo thumbnail, presented in a stylish manor.

Right but that still doesn't detract that at the time, many people saw fingerprint scanning as a gimmick.
 
Isn't 2.5 mb a bit small for a 12mp photo?
Most photos of this size are around 5-6mb.
Is Apple doing some compression to justify the 16gb model?
Or are they downmodding the quality so they can 'increase' it with theiPhone 7?

Jpeg files sizes are usually 25% of the megapixel size. An 8MP iPhone photos were usually ~2MB. 6S photos should be around 3MB's.
 
Right but that still doesn't detract that at the time, many people saw fingerprint scanning as a gimmick.
Just as many people now see Force Touch as a gimmick. I can tell you that I didn't see Touch ID as a gimmick, don't see Force Touch as a gimmick, but I do consider Live Photos to be one to some extent. It may still catch on eventually, as many features that Apple push out do.
 
Isn't 2.5 mb a bit small for a 12mp photo?
Most photos of this size are around 5-6mb.
Is Apple doing some compression to justify the 16gb model?
Or are they downmodding the quality so they can 'increase' it with theiPhone 7?
Every JPEG from any camera is compressed but that compression can be varied over a wide range. A factor of 20 in the jpeg file size between the minimum and maximum compression level is easily possible. An uncompressed 8-bit 12 MP image has a file size of 36 MB, the size of 12 MP JPEGs might vary between 20 and less than one 1 MB.

The size of a compressed image can also vary significantly how uniform the image content is. A jpeg of a perfectly uniform colour (which isn't really possible to get from a camera because there is always some variation due to noise) of a 12 MP image can be compressed down to 100 KB (most of which is overhead probably).
 
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