When recording in 1080p using the camera it is zoomed in. When using 720p you can see a lot more in the picture, where as 1080p seems to zoom in on the central object.
Now I was just wondering is it possible to mod this to make 1080p video record without being zoomed in (like how 720p does it) or is it impossible and it has to work that way ?
sorrowuk said:
When recording in 1080p using the camera it is zoomed in. When using 720p you can see a lot more in the picture, where as 1080p seems to zoom in on the central object.
Now I was just wondering is it possible to mod this to make 1080p video record without being zoomed in (like how 720p does it) or is it impossible and it has to work that way ?
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Check out the video recording review in gsmarena.com
http://www.gsmarena.com/samsung_i9100_galaxy_s_ii-review-597p9.php
Here's a thread about it if you want more detail.
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=959475
when the sensor chip (the camera) cannot crank for example 30FPS at 1080P resolution, "zooming" is a trick.
The sensor has less surface to scan with the zooming and can then crank out the said fps at said resolution.
The exynos chip however does "real" 1080p encoding and the image is really 1080p, but appears zoomed, and therefore contains slightly less details than if the sensor did not zoom (since parts of the field of view are not viewable)
bilboa1 said:
when the sensor chip (the camera) cannot crank for example 30FPS at 1080P resolution, "zooming" is a trick.
The sensor has less surface to scan with the zooming and can then crank out the said fps at said resolution.
The exynos chip however does "real" 1080p encoding and the image is really 1080p, but appears zoomed, and therefore contains slightly less details than if the sensor did not zoom (since parts of the field of view are not viewable)
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So would it ever be possible to have 1080p video without 'zooming' by modding the firmware/ in a custom rom?
Or is it hardware limitation ?
sorrowuk said:
So would it ever be possible to have 1080p video without 'zooming' by modding the firmware/ in a custom rom?
Or is it hardware limitation ?
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Click to collapse
Physical Hardware limitation
Native res of sensor = 3264x2448
HD Video = 1920x1080
3264 / 1920 = 1.7
so the only way to record 1920 is to bin the .7 thus cutting out much of the screen.
now 720p HD only has a horizontal res of 1280 that goes into said sensor 2.55, so you only need to cut out the .55 (less than full hd) and then read alternate pixels and bin the rest.
Hope that makes sense
deanwray said:
Physical Hardware limitation
Native res of sensor = 3264x2448
HD Video = 1920x1080
3264 / 1920 = 1.7
so the only way to record 1920 is to bin the .7 thus cutting out much of the screen.
now 720p HD only has a horizontal res of 1280 that goes into said sensor 2.55, so you only need to cut out the .55 (less than full hd) and then read alternate pixels and bin the rest.
Hope that makes sense
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I think that even binning the 0.7 factor should give a better result than the actual "zoomed in" effect. In the other hand whe should have the zoom function at 1080P resoultion too.
DrSlump76 said:
I think that even binning the 0.7 factor should give a better result than the actual "zoomed in" effect. In the other hand whe should have the zoom function at 1080P resoultion too.
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Look at the calculations, you cant zoom in 1080 cause the sensor res aint enough!
deanwray said:
Look at the calculations, you cant zoom in 1080 cause the sensor res aint enough!
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Humm... i'm still dubtfull about this limitation. Correct me if i'm wrong, but i think that the htc sensation is able to apply digital zoom @ 1080P, and it should have an 8Mpixel camera too, isn't it?
I can't post a link but if you searc for "HTC Sensation takes FULL HD 1080p videos " in youtube you will find a video taken with htc sensation with digital zoom!
I don't think that the galaxy s2 hardware is unable to do the same thiks that htc sensation does...
Oh, digital zoom is easy, but a bit pointless. So no point zooming if your source resolution drops, why not record native at the lower res and increase on pc? You will get better result that a phone attempting bilinear calculations .. So probably excluded cause of it being pointless.
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deanwray said:
Oh, digital zoom is easy, but a bit pointless. So no point zooming if your source resolution drops, why not record native at the lower res and increase on pc? You will get better result that a phone attempting bilinear calculations .. So probably excluded cause of it being pointless.
Sent from my GT-I9100 using XDA Premium App
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Click to collapse
Hi
digital zoom during video recording is not applied by a simple bilinear calculation. Its quite the opposite:
No zoom -> use the whole sensor area and then "downsample" it to obtain the desired dimensions
Zoom->Sample the exact dimension from the center of the sensor.
Infact, if you watch two videos of the same scene taken with the sgs2 720P and then 1080P, you will notice that the 1080P gives a zoomed effect, becouse samsung only uses the rectangle on the center of the sensor to sample the frames, while with 720P uses the whole sensor area.
Power limitations? Unskilled Samsung's engineers? Who knows..
DrSlump76 said:
Hi
digital zoom during video recording is not applied by a simple bilinear calculation. Its quite the opposite:
No zoom -> use the whole sensor area and then "downsample" it to obtain the desired dimensions
Zoom->Sample the exact dimension from the center of the sensor.
Infact, if you watch two videos of the same scene taken with the sgs2 720P and then 1080P, you will notice that the 1080P give a zoomed effect, becouse samsung uses only the rectangle on the center of the sensor to sample the frames, while with 720P uses the whole sensor area.
Power limitations? Unskilled Samsung's engineers? Who knows..
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Click to collapse
I don't think that it's neither power limitations or unskilled samsung engineers. At 1080p, it uses most of the sensor, so zooming in will decrease the quality of the image to the point of being pointless at filming 1080p.
The reason why 720p uses the entire sensor area is because it does something called pixel binning. It uses the adjacent pixels to determine which color/info is more accurate (so a single pixel in the middle uses the ones around it to determine which color is closer to the actual source).
See here for more info:
http://www.svi.nl/PixelBinning
With pixel binning, you get less noise but at a cost of lower resolution. Therefore, they implemented zoom for 720p and the reason why 720p uses the entire sensor.
So the reason for why the 720p uses the entire sensor and 1080p only uses a section IS due to hardware limitations. 1080p needs at least a 12.4MP resolution for pixel binning.
As there is pixel binning, 720p will produce higher quality zooms than if 1080p could've zoomed using crop and bilinear enlargement (which will create pixelated images). That is why I assume they didn't include 1080p zoom - for quality purposes.
BTW - pixel binning is a technique also used by the iPhone 4.
DrSlump76 said:
Hi
digital zoom during video recording is not applied by a simple bilinear calculation. Its quite the opposite:
No zoom -> use the whole sensor area and then "downsample" it to obtain the desired dimensions
Zoom->Sample the exact dimension from the center of the sensor.
Infact, if you watch two videos of the same scene taken with the sgs2 720P and then 1080P, you will notice that the 1080P gives a zoomed effect, becouse samsung only uses the rectangle on the center of the sensor to sample the frames, while with 720P uses the whole sensor area.
Power limitations? Unskilled Samsung's engineers? Who knows..
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Click to collapse
Thats wrong! It's only correct if the sensor has the physical resolution that surpasses the target res by 2 exactly! Look at my previous post, I explain it a bit better. Your taking about sensor crop and pixel binning, not digital zoom.
Oh and bilinear is not simple, when you think of the amount of subpixel influence you have to create.
Neways, point is digital zoom creates pixels from thin air, well, programatically. So the detail is not present, hence why digital zoom is a consumer buzz than a valued feature.
Thanks for your replies guys. I would like to bring two more arguments for my theory:
1) The 720P recordings that we can find in the net shows a low quality zoom
2) In the other hand, there are some videos taken with the htc sensation that shows an almost perfect zoom @ 1080P
The question is:
if the htc product uses virtually the same sensor of the sgs2, how can they implement the zoom??
Here a video sample with digital zoom @1080P:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZDcpggOHRc&feature=list_related&playnext=1&list=SP9E838D931C71486D
Thanks!
DrSlump76 said:
Thanks for your replies guys. I would like to bring two more arguments for my theory:
1) The 720P recordings that we can find in the net shows a low quality zoom
2) In the other hand, there are some videos taken with the htc sensation that shows an almost perfect zoom @ 1080P
The question is:
if the htc product uses virtually the same sensor of the sgs2, how can they implement the zoom??
Thanks!
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Click to collapse
The answer is: Digital Zoom lol
Tis easy to see in the video that detail is lost, pixel get bigger then filtered etc. So Digital Zoom is a software feature, not hardware!
Also people seem to forget a few very important things regarding capture quality, the bitrate of the encoding profile in use. From what I see the sgs2 has a variable 10-14mbit profile active for full HD. Some of my pro cameras use 35-50mbit. So I'm going to look into how to mod this if i can since the hardware should be able to handle a higher rate, busy at the mo though.
at the end of the day though, tis a phone, if you want really good quality get a pro sumer hd cam, or a 5dmk2, or if you won the lottery get a Red Epic and shoot 5k res at 1000's fps. However none of those have mail/chat or phone capabilities
for 1080p are taken 1920x1080 pixels from the center of 8Mp sensor... (in this manner there is a "zoom effect" of about 2x and less view)
for other resolutions are applied pixel binning tecnhique (all pixel from sensor are used, and is scaling from 8mp to output video resolution)
take original pixels produces better quality (because are original pixels and not scaled), but less signal/noise ratio (but, because galaxys2 sensor is good, noise is low also if you take original pixel and don't use pixel binning that increases signal/noise ratio)..
also, use original pixels and don't use pixel binning, requires less power (in this manner you can have 1080p video at about 30fps and high bitrate)
deanwray said:
The answer is: Digital Zoom lol
Tis easy to see in the video that detail is lost, pixel get bigger then filtered etc. So Digital Zoom is a software feature, not hardware!
Also people seem to forget a few very important things regarding capture quality, the bitrate of the encoding profile in use. From what I see the sgs2 has a variable 10-14mbit profile active for full HD. Some of my pro cameras use 35-50mbit. So I'm going to look into how to mod this if i can since the hardware should be able to handle a higher rate, busy at the mo though.
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Click to collapse
Ok deanwray, you're perfectly right, but i would prefer to choose by myself if i wish to use the zoom or not, awared that if i use the digital zoom, the quality will be affected. In the other hand, in this way, the 1080P video would have better field of view (instead of the zoomed effect we have now) and less noise.
About the bitrate: maybe it's possible to raise it to 20Mbit, but i think that going above this limit is quite difficult. According to me, it's better to implement the zoom in 1080P and a better audio recording.
I was thinking: if they're unable to implement such features... how can we hope to obtain higher bitrates.. ?
DrSlump76 said:
Ok deanwray, you're perfectly right, but i would prefer to choose by myself if i wish to use the zoom or not, awared that if i use the digital zoom, the quality will be affected. In the other hand, in this way, the 1080P video would have better field of view (instead of the zoomed effect we have now) and less noise.
About the bitrate: maybe it's possible to raise it to 20Mbit, but i think that going above this limit is quite difficult. According to me, it's better to implement the zoom in 1080P and a better audio recording.
I was thinking: if they're unable to implement such features... how can we hope to obtain higher bitrates.. ?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
If it's not firmware (camera firmware) limited, there are calls in the android sdk to set bitrate, I would probably look at writing a camera when I have time. Never looked at attempting to mod the default one. Have found something odd though, did a few tests, and there should be perceptual zoom due to sensor cropping at 720p, but compared against an 8mp photo, there aint! So thats a bit wierd to me
deanwray said:
If it's not firmware (camera firmware) limited, there are calls in the android sdk to set bitrate, I would probably look at writing a camera when I have time. Never looked at attempting to mod the default one. Have found something odd though, did a few tests, and there should be perceptual zoom due to sensor cropping at 720p, but compared against an 8mp photo, there aint! So thats a bit wierd to me
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Click to collapse
According to you, is it possible to modify/create a camera app that implements a digital zoom or better algorithms for image sampling?
What kind of access is possible to gain to the application processor's peripherals with android os?
There are some realtime image scaling algorithms that could be implemented via gpu or, better, via dsp if the exynos integrates a dsp onboard (like the TI's omap do).
Can someone explain why the camera of xperia mini pro s17i is so crappy? Grainy? blurry? (can go like this all day).
seriously, is there a way to overclock the cpu to get a better camera result? or maybe even full hd videos?
tnx.
Its about the quality of the sensor, (ability to capture light) no way to increase quality by overclocking.
Same goes to video recording, restricted by the sensor.
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I'm sure there's a way that you can edit the sensor. Someone just needs to figure out what the app that's controlling the camera is and see if there's anything in there that can be changed. Tbh I thought the camera on the Mini pro was quite good considering its a small phone.
LOL overclocking the cpu will not make the camera any better
You can't get better resolution of your camera, but you can playback 1080p files
Sent from my Xperia Mini using Tapatalk
I don't know why people complain about the camera on the Mini Pro. Sure, it may be grainy and blurry on low light conditions, but even digital cameras have problems with low light.
Here's a sample in a day light, I think it's amazing quality for a phone at this price.
the video camera is blurry, compared to samsung focus hd videos
Yeah I'm curious about the potential of the still camera for 1080p also, I have not read anywhere that the display can show 1080p...but surely if the video camera can take up to 720p...the display should be able to show that? Is our phone screen then 720p? Wherevere I read the specs of the phone I cannot find that info. Is it tied to resolution? We've got MDPI ... but so does the X8 and that is not 720p.
you cant record 1080p by overclocking because phone hardware must be capable to do full HD encoding, adreno205 GPU along with 1Ghz single core scorpion CPU cant encode Full HD video so unfortunately, Its impossible to record Full HD video on our devices.
People should stop posting questions without using google first.
Some display 101: the 720p,1080p,1080i are display resolutions of a said device. The number is the amount of vertical pixels and the letter is either progressive scan, or interlaced. So, our devices have 480x320 pixels. The "best" resolution is a 360p. I put " " because in the end its all about how the media file is compressed. From my experience anything over 480p is an overkill... You wont see a difference between 480p, 720p, 1080p. Just a waste of space. If you want better results with a video file download Mx video player. It allows hardware encoding.
About the camera. No you cannot change the way it works. Unless ofcourse you are able to engineer a CMOS sensor in your garage that is. So you can stick with what you get. If you arw find of night photos where it gets grainy, get a camera, rather rely on a camera phone to do your business....
Sent from my ST17i using XDA
Guys don't know if this is a stupid question but can't we get the 2mp front facing camera to record 720p? I'm asking because the Galaxy S3 has a 2mp front shooter and the nexus has 1.3mp and they both do 720p video capture. I'm sure the SII FFC pushes enough pixels, it's a matter of being able to record them right?
not about mega pixels, its about sensor and camera module.
S2 front camera cant do 720P
You probs find it could actually do it fine just Samsung weren't happy maybe with the performance so didn't add the feature.
the 2mp camera is more than capable of producing 720p resolution hell its virtually 1080p (1920x1080). But like mentioned maybe the sensor etc isn't upto scratch.
Companies arent stupid you know, the S2 could do it but then thats one less selling point for a successor so they ommit certain features to make consumers upgrade.
So looks like the hardware is not capable of it, so no way we can get increased video quality? Like 800x480 atleast?