Why Your Phone Shoots 4K But Your Camera Still Doesn’t

The new iPhone will shoot 4K at 60 fps and 1080p at 240 fps. But why is it that smartphones seem to be shooting “better” video resolution than most “serious” cameras? In this 8-minute video, Max Yuryev looks into the technical reasons behind this.

It seems to boil down to the fact that the CPUs inside many cameras aren’t good enough to handle such high-speed video. In smartphones, the processor is “insanely powerful,” and it enables them to deal with that massive amount of information at 240 frames per second.

So why don’t they just put bigger processors inside cameras? Higher processing power could mean that cameras can more easily overheat, especially in hot weather. And there’s also a cost factor. DSLRs are, after all, primarily for stills photography. Larger processors would ramp up the cost for what only a smaller subset of users would benefit from.

Also, Yuryev notes that smartphone technology is coming on incredibly fast thanks to the huge amount of competition in the market. This only means further development and investment into the next generation of processors.

(via Max Yuryev via ISO 1200)