UKC

Can someone explain to me, how a gopro1 can shoot good 720.
And a small point and shoot that claims it shoots in 720 looks all grainy and horrible?
Cheers

In reply to zimpara:

In short, not all pixels are made equally.

The image sensor inside the camera is split up into many small squares (pixels). Each pixel measures the light level at a spot in front of it. The quality of the image sensor will determine how faithfully it captures the scene in front of it.

Factors affecting quality of the image sensor include, the physical size of the image sensor, the quality of the lens sitting in front of it, the quality of the image sensor itself, the circuitry which converts from sensor signal to digital data.

More pixels is not necessarily better. If there is a very small image sensor and you split it up into even smaller squares, each individual pixel is likely to be of lower quality if you don't then spend money on improving everything else in the camera. However, number of pixels is a good selling point to consumers who don't know much about cameras, this means that this is a common issue with cheaper cameras.

In reply to Angrypenguin:

Not forgetting the quality of the lens/glass makes huge difference.

In reply to zimpara:

How old is the gopro, and what are you comparing it against?

And what conditions were you filming in, broad sunlight or a dimly lit room?

You can do a lot with good lighting, but as they say "You can't polish a turd".

In reply to zimpara:

There's also the codec to consider - some codecs compress more than others and thus quality is different. There's also processing power of the recording device - if the scene has a lots of movement in it some devices / codecs can struggle to record everything accurately.

In reply to Angrypenguin:

720p is only 1megapixel - unless the camera is capable of less than this I'd suggest the sensor & lens are not the cause of 'grainy and horrible' footage - it's going to be the codec.

In reply to Toerag:

Thanks! What is this codec, is it inside the camera and unchangeable?

In reply to zimpara:


Codecs are what convert the data into something that we can see and hear. Some examples are divx,xvid, mp4, H.264, H.265, MP2.

Ever downloaded a movie off the internet with some weird file system like MVK. You could see the movie but could not hear it. This most probably was because your computer or media software did not have the right codecs. Microsoft try to sell the codecs to you while software like VLC are free and can cope with just about any codec you throw at them.

A cheap action-cam may use a propriety codec that very few can read. Wile other cheap action-cams are cheap for a reason, as in they may have the components such as a sensor, lens and storage but not enough processing power to cope with the expectations of the person who bought the action-cam.

Saying all this not all cheap action-cams are rubbish. With a little research you can get an action-cam to go toe-to-toe with aGoPro.

http://www.techmoan.com/blog/category/action-cameras