cameras
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Insta360’s tiny new GO stabilized camera could be game-changer for social video
Insta360 has quickly established itself as the leader in 360-degree video capture, at least for the consumer market, and its new GO stabilized camera builds on that legacy and extends some of the tech it has built into the category of more traditional, non-360-degree footage.
The $199.99 GO is truly tiny — it weighs less than an ounce and measures less than two inches tall and an inch wide. It’s tiny, and that’s ideal for the use case that Insta360 has in mind for this device — wearing it or mounting it virtually anywhere for capturing quick clips. The GO’s all about quick action grabs, with a 30-second cap on clip recording, which you trigger by pressing the lone control button on the device (a second press stops the clip, unless you let it run the entire 30 seconds).
GO’s design is clearly meant for social sharing, but its secret weapon — versus just using your smartphone or making use of other devices — is that it packs Insta360’s FlowState stabilization on board. This is the company’s digital video stabilization feature, which works to great effect in its Insta360 One X 360-degree camera for smoothing out footage so that even in intense action sequences it’s not nausea-inducing.
GO also features a magnetic body, which is designed to work in tandem with a variety of accessories, including backs for securing them unobtrusively to clothing, an underwater housing (the camera itself is IPX4 rated, which means essentially it’s protected from splashes but not meant to be submerged) and mounts for sticking to things like surf boards or vehicles. It can capture clips at a resolution of up to 2720 x 2720, but it crops the image to 1080p (at 25 fps) for export as a result of the stabilization tech.
Shooting modes include a standard 25 fps as mentioned, as well as a 30 fps time-lapse, which can record up to eight hours (which will output a 9-second video) and a hyperlapse mode that can shoot for up to 30 minutes to generate a five-minute video. It can capture photos, too, exporting square images at 2560 x 2560 resolution, or a number of landscape options reading down from there.
In addition to simplifying capture, the Insta360 GO also hopes to make editing and sharing much easier with its FlashCut auto-editing feature. This software tool uses “AI” according to the company, in order to find the best clips (you can even sort by category, i.e. “food”) you capture throughout the day and then stitch them together in a final edit. You also can fully tweak the edits it provides if you’d rather be a more involved creator.
The biggest limitation, based on just reading the specs and not having had a chance to test this out yet, is that the battery life is rated at around 200 clips per day, based on an average of 20 seconds per clip. But that’s including recharging the camera when not in use using the included Charge Case, which has 2.5 extra charges using its built-in battery. That and the recording limitation could prove challenging to anyone looking to create a lot of content with this camera, but on the other hand, it’s very easy to ensure you have it with you at all times — even when your smartphone isn’t nearby.
At $199.99, the Insta360 GO isn’t exactly cheap — but it does include the Charge Case, a pendant with a magnet you can use to wear it around you neck, a stand, a clip for clothing and a sticky mount for putting it on most smooth surfaces. You also can laser-engrave it if you purchase it directly via Insta360’s website. But after some missed starts for this category, like the Google Clips camera, and earlier entrants like, the Memoto and Narrative Clip life-logging cameras, I’ll be curious to see if Insta360’s additional features help this gadget define a category.
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Oppo shows first under-screen camera in bid to eliminated the hated notch
Ever since the notch was first added to smartphones, everyone in the world except the deeply deluded and my editor have wished it gone. Oppo has done it — or at least shown that it can be done — with a demonstration unit at Mobile World Congress in Shanghai. iPhone users can console themselves that Oppo kind of sounds like Apple.
Oppo and Xiaomi both teased their upcoming under-screen cameras in recent weeks, but it’s one thing to put out a video and quite another to show a working model to the public. And Oppo’s device was unmistakably present in Shanghai.
Unfortunately, if you were hoping that the first device would knock it out of the park… not quite. Eyes-on photos and impressions from Engadget China show that the transparent LCD used to cover the camera assembly is, or can be, noticeably different from its surroundings. Of course the team there was trying to capture it, and from straight on when you’re not looking for it this effect may not be particularly pronounced. But it’s there.
The camera itself, since it loses a lot of incoming light to the LCD layer, has a larger sensor with bigger pixels on it to better capture that light. This suggests a lower resolution for the unit than other front-facing cameras, and obviously shooting through an extra layer will reduce sharpness and increase artifacting. Oppo says it is working on reducing these in software, but there’s only so much you can do. The sample photos don’t look so hot.
It’s not going to set the world on fire, but Oppo’s less visible camera is a step towards a notchless future, and that I can support. No word on when it’ll actually be available for purchase, or in what models — perhaps Xiaomi will take the opportunity to announce its under-screen camera with a few more of the relevant details.
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See the new iPhone’s ‘focus pixels’ up close
The new iPhones have excellent cameras, to be sure. But it’s always good to verify Apple’s breathless onstage claims with first-hand reports. We have our own review of the phones and their photography systems, but teardowns provide the invaluable service of letting you see the biggest changes with your own eyes — augmented, of course, by a high-powered microscope.
We’ve already seen iFixit’s solid-as-always disassembly of the phone, but TechInsights gets a lot closer to the device’s components — including the improved camera of the iPhone XS and XS Max.
Although the optics of the new camera are as far as we can tell unchanged since the X, the sensor is a new one and is worth looking closely at.
Microphotography of the sensor die show that Apple’s claims are borne out and then some. The sensor size has increased from 32.8mm2 to 40.6mm2 — a huge difference despite the small units. Every tiny bit counts at this scale. (For comparison, the Galaxy S9 is 45mm2, and the soon-to-be-replaced Pixel 2 is 25mm2.)
The pixels themselves also, as advertised, grew from 1.22 microns (micrometers) across to 1.4 microns — which should help with image quality across the board. But there’s an interesting, subtler development that has continually but quietly changed ever since its introduction: the “focus pixels.”
That’s Apple’s brand name for phase detection autofocus (PDAF) points, found in plenty of other devices. The basic idea is that you mask off half a sub-pixel every once in a while (which I guess makes it a sub-sub-pixel), and by observing how light enters these half-covered detectors you can tell whether something is in focus or not.
Of course, you need a bunch of them to sense the image patterns with high fidelity, but you have to strike a balance: losing half a pixel may not sound like much, but if you do it a million times, that’s half a megapixel effectively down the drain. Wondering why all the PDAF points are green? Many camera sensors use an “RGBG” sub-pixel pattern, meaning there are two green sub-pixels for each red and blue one — it’s complicated why. But there are twice as many green sub-pixels and therefore the green channel is more robust to losing a bit of information.
Apple introduced PDAF in the iPhone 6, but as you can see in TechInsights’ great diagram, the points are pretty scarce. There’s one for maybe every 64 sub-pixels, and not only that, they’re all masked off in the same orientation: either the left or right half gone.
The 6S and 7 Pluses saw the number double to one PDAF point per 32 sub-pixels. And in the 8 Plus, the number is improved to one per 20 — but there’s another addition: now the phase detection masks are on the tops and bottoms of the sub-pixels as well. As you can imagine, doing phase detection in multiple directions is a more sophisticated proposal, but it could also significantly improve the accuracy of the process. Autofocus systems all have their weaknesses, and this may have addressed one Apple regretted in earlier iterations.
Which brings us to the XS (and Max, of course), in which the PDAF points are now one per 16 sub-pixels, having increased the frequency of the vertical phase detection points so that they’re equal in number to the horizontal one. Clearly the experiment paid off and any consequent light loss has been mitigated or accounted for.
I’m curious how the sub-pixel patterns of Samsung, Huawei and Google phones compare, and I’m looking into it. But I wanted to highlight this interesting little evolution. It’s an interesting example of the kind of changes that are hard to understand when explained in simple number form — we’ve doubled this, or there are a million more of that — but which make sense when you see them in physical form.
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A system to tell good fake bokeh from bad
The pixel-peepers at DxOMark have shared some of the interesting metrics and techniques they use to judge the quality of a smartphone’s artificial bokeh, or background blur in photos. Not only is it difficult to do in the first place, but they have to systematize it! Their guide should provide even seasoned shooters with some insight into the many ways computational bokeh varies in quality. Read More
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Galaxy Note 8 ties iPhone 8 Plus in camera tests
The iPhone 8 Plus’s reign as “the best smartphone camera” was a mighty short one. DxOMark, the testing outfit many look to for fair evaluations of cameras from DSLRs to phones, gave Samsung’s Galaxy S8 a 94, tying the iPhone and in some ways exceeding it. iPhone 8 and 8 Plus cameras get top marks from testing outfit DxOMark
If our review didn’t convince you that the cameras in the latest iPhones are something special, perhaps DxOMark’s lab-heavy evaluation process will do the trick. The camera testing site unequivocally states that the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus have the best smartphone cameras it’s ever tested — though they aren’t without their flaws. Read More
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Lightroom for iOS receives the gift of universal RAW support
Adobe’s Lightroom is a widely used tool among photographers, but the mobile version has always been hampered by poor RAW support — until now. Previously limited to DNG files, Lightroom for iOS now has the ability to open and tweak any RAW file that the desktop version can. Read More
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Drone Maker DJI Takes Minority Stake In Iconic Swedish Camera Company Hasselblad
On the heels of a $75 million investment from Accel, Chinese drone king DJI is putting some of its funding to use by making some investments of its own. The company this week announced that it would be taking a stake in Hasselblad, a camera maker from Sweden that focuses (!) on high quality equipment, often used in more challenging environments. This is a minority stake and neither… Read More
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Lytro Introduces ‘Immerge’ For Cinematic Virtual Reality
Camera maker Lytro is hopping into virtual reality. Today, it announced a product called “Immerge” which the company describes as “world’s first professional light field solution for cinematic VR.” What does that mean exactly? Well Lytro wants to provide tools to shoot live action virtual reality. It built its “light field” solution from the ground up.… Read More
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