Over the past week some footage from Sony and other real world uses has been surfacing. Many shows off the super slow motion modes and others tout the performance in 4k. The quality is for the most part good but not great and shows a clear aliasing and moire resolution loss at 480fps and 960fps. The codec at 50 Mbit is quite good and is not the weak link, the cameras suffer from line skipping as the readout frame rate increases to below 720p resolution in real terms while being saved on a 1080p wrapper.
We have compiled a series of footage samples found on the net for you to look at. Some are outright high speed samples and others are interface walk through samples. It should give a good idea of what quality we are talking about.
RX100 IV & RX10 II – Super Slow Motion- Nature by Sony:
RX10 II – High Precision 4K by Sony:
Sony RX10 II High Frame Rate (1000fps) by dcfever hk:
Sony RX100 IV HFR Video Mode by Imaging Resource:
Barber brothers, shot on a Sony RX100 IV from Johnnie Behiri:
The barber video above by Johnnie Behiri shows the great quality that can be extracted from the Sony RX100 IV. The video is part of a hands on look and initial review at Cinema 5D which you should read as it has some interesting usability info. It also seems to show that battery life in the HFR high speed mode eats the battery quite fast. It is also possibly the first samples of 240fps and 120fps using the camera as they seem to have much better resolution in slow motion than 480fps and 960fps modes.
Sony Cybershot DSC-RX100 IV compact camera by CameraNU.nl:
This walk thru even when it is spoken in Dutch makes it easy to follow along and see where the HFR high speed modes are accessed in the interface. It shows how quick and modern the interface is even to cameras just released a year ago.
As a reminder here are the frame sizes available in HFR modes on these cameras in Quality Priority Mode:
- 240fps NTSC/250fps PAL (1,824×1,026)
- 480fps NTSC/500fps PAL (1,676×566)
- 960fps NTSC/1000fps PAL (1,136×384)
Pre-orders at Amazon.com:
Yes the 480 fps and 960 fps modes are only decent in quality but not great. However, I still think these modes are better than the 720P 240 fps mode on the Iphone 6 and Iphone 6 + in terms of aliasing and resolution. Can’t wait to get mine to test.
Could be but until we have a sample with an iPhone 6 vs RX shooting the same thing it’s all speculation!
480fps and 960fps needs to be downscaled in post to 720p.
240fps should be workable but imho also needs some post.
Maybe 240fps -> 480fps in post will be better than recording 480fps
The sensor and lens is of course far more superior than the iphone 6.
Detail wise we will have to see but it is a given that at 240fps the RX series will be vastly superior. At 480fps 1,676×566 it could be a tie. The sensor, the lens and the codec are all much better on the RX series than the iPhone 6 no question about it!
Good news! I will start testing the RX100 IV in my hands tomorrow and share clips with it compared to the iphone 6. Excited to test the 120 fps mode as well! I wonder if Sony is using that extra vertical pixels to improve resolution. Even the 960/1000 fps sample clips look better than the FPS1000 Silver and Gold model’s 640 X 480P 840 fps clips. But that is to be expected because of the extra vertical resolution on the RX100 IV.
Excellent, You can post any info you find in the Sony Forum I will add topics for the RX series. Therefore you can edit and add to your experience as time goes on. Congrats on getting the camera so quickly!
I have a question: Does the RX10 ii shoot at full HD at 120fps? Or is that only a feature on the RX100 IV?
Both cameras offer the same recording features except for… The RX100 4 cannot record more than 5 minutes per clip in 4k. The RX10 II can record up to 29min 59sec of 4k.