Poor camera, extraordinary price



[ad_1]

In my eyes, all this looks … about the same. On the one hand, it is fine for hydrogen because the Pixel 2 and the Note 9 both have excellent cameras. On the other hand, the value proposition of hydrogen seems low. The good news is that since 2D images are pretty good, 3D images should be too.

Agree, but what about the video? Will RED's expertise in cinema cameras be transmitted to smartphone video?

Answer: not really. The video looks worse than Note 9 and Pixel 2. The colors of hydrogen are a bit overcooked, and although it's hard to see because of YouTube's compression, there's serious audio and video compression artifacts in the original. files.

I was expecting better colors, especially from a company like RED. There is nothing false with the colors here, but I was hoping for very faded colors that would be suitable for color grading in post-production or just beautiful colors, like those produced by Fuji cameras. I may be waiting too much, but if you only get standard video on smartphone, but use two cameras to do it, this seems like a solution looking for a problem.

The camera app is a place where RED could have gained important points in my book. It's ugly as a sin, and I've been expecting tons of filmmakers options, like bit rate control, frame rate and format. " encoding. You get options for white balance, saturation, contrast and brightness, but that's all and they are buried in the settings.

3D Media

One thing that many of you wonder, I'm sure: want to 3D media outside the cinema? I really think, but not like that. Return to the clock until 1991, when a company called Nishika released its lenticular 3D camera. It captures four images at a time on a movie, which the tech savvy can combine to create GIFs with a familiarly called "3D wiggle" effect. The camera had a resurgence on Tumblr. Just search for "Nishika" and you will find an entire community displaying these new 3D time slices.

https://iiieyeview.tumblr.com/post/165876198357/flacko

When I look at 4V images on hydrogen, I feel a feeling very similar to that of Nishika's images. There is more temporal and geographical context – time is frozen, but the separation between the subject and the background gives the scene a more vivid aspect. It's really cool. But there is a huge difference: I can share Nishika 3D images with you on this website, in a group chat or on Twitter, but I can not share these 4V images with you anywhere. Photography, for most people, is not a solitary art.

I've tried to manually extract the pair of stereoscopic images taken on Hydrogen and hack it in 3D, but there is no official way of doing it. get the two pictures. RED uses an exclusive method to incorporate the second image into the metadata of the first image, which means there is no alternative for DIY. When I asked Jannard about it, he said that an official export tool might appear in the future, but that you can not do it today.

All of these factors add up to a very compromised film making tool.

The 4V video is, fortunately, a different story. The output file uses a proprietary .h4v container, and you can import these files into Adobe Premiere, but they must be renamed to .mp4. It sounds useless and annoying, but hey, it's a hydrogen world and we live in this world.

There are other disappointing aspects of 4V. The first is that you are limited to 1080p. This is understandable, to some extent, because the Snapdragon 835 was not designed to handle the bandwidth of two 4K streams. Nevertheless, it will probably look like some kind of depressing for someone who really wanted to create a low budget 3D movie, which is apparently the goal of this device. Worse, these seem to be recorded at about 11 Mbps, which is brutally low. These videos are compressed to death.

All of these factors add up to a very compromised film making tool. 29 fps, low resolution, extremely high compression and no options to change these settings – such are the features of a consumer product, not an enthusiastic camera.

If you really want to make a 3D movie with an incredibly low budget (and on a phone, for whatever reason), it would be cheaper to buy two Galaxy S9s and find out later. You can also get one of those abandoned 3D Panasonic lenses on eBay, snap it on a Panasonic G85 and get into town.

In summary, hydrogen is not really better than any other flagship phone for photography or video on mobile. Nothing on this device makes it easy to create content, except that you can extract the SD card without a SIM tool.

<img alt = "Red Hydrogen SIM" data-caption = "Red Hydrogen SIM" data-credit = "" data-credit-link-back = "" data-dam-provider = "" local-data-id = " -4-5047065-1541174284838 "data-media-id =" 381641fc-3374-3899-8845-1dfa8cc6f240 "data-original-url =" https://s.yimg.com/os/creatr-uploaded-images/2018 -11-11cc3ab0-b8-11e8-adff-6f695a78708b "data-title =" Red Hydrogen SIM Card "src =" https://o.aolcdn.com/images/dims?crop=1600%2C1068%2C0%2C0&quality= 85 & format = jpg & resize = 1600 2C1068 & image_uri = https% 3A% 2F% 2Fs.yimg.com% 2Fos% 2creatr-images uploaded% 2F2018-12

The rest of the hydrogen

As a piece of equipment, hydrogen is not inimitable. It is gigantic, heavy and has the same industrial energy drink design as RED's movie cameras, but as a top-seed I like it. It's like a device that I could confidently do during a remote mountaineering trip without fear of breaking it. I like that a lot, and if Samsung had manufactured an active variant of S9, I would have liked that too.

But like a phone, the hydrogen falls. Even in standard 2D mode, the screen is bad. I can easily see the pixels (this is neither a joke nor a euphemism, I can literally see them), and there is a refraction of the internal light that gives the whole of the screen a low contrast appearance, very similar to older TFT screens.

<img alt = "RED hydrogen buttons" data-caption = "RED hydrogen buttons" data-credit = "" data-credit-link-back = "" data-dam-provider = "" data-local-id = "local -5-6958170-1541174381808 "data-media-id =" b0aefe05-0720-32a8-8f75-7ba37a92e1ae "data-original-url =" https://s.yimg.com/os/creatr-uploaded-images/2018 -11 / 43d28920-b8-11e8-9bfd-fa19c6e95fda "data-title =" Buttons RED hydrogen "src =" https://o.aolcdn.com/images/dims?crop=1600%2C1068%2C0%2C0&quality=85&formality = 85 & format = jpg & resize = 1600% 2C1068 & image_uri = https% 3A% 2F% 2Fs.yimg.fr

In 4V mode, the screen is a bit better than on a Nintendo 3DS. It's not lenticular, which means you can watch it in 4V mode vertically or horizontally, and I noticed by showing it to colleagues that the 3D viewing angles are actually quite wide. But if you move the phone to all the image shifts and to an unstable appearance, like any other 3D screen without glasses. This is not terrible, but it is certainly not great.

One thing that hydrogen really provides is battery life. The gigantic frame of the device is padded with a 4,500 mAh battery that keeps moving. Enthusiasts are asking for thicker phones with larger batteries for a while now, and calls from these people have been answered.

Unfortunately, the AT & T review unit that I received is full of bloatware. The launcher uses a strange 3D rotating animation when you slide in the home screens that takes you back to Android 5.0. In addition, the RED suite of applications contains extremely ugly gray icons that do not match any of the other icons. Even though Hydrogen uses Android 8.1, the software gives the impression that I am using an old phone.

<img alt = "RED HYDROGEN ICONS" data-caption = "RED HYDROGEN ICONS" data-credit = "" data-credit-link-back = "" data-dam-provider = "" data-local-id = "local-8-1846346- 1541174768701" data-media-id = "a4b4286a-4096-3598-98ae-c10492383e64" data-original-url = "https://s.yimg.com/os / creatr-uploaded-images / 2018-11 / 29471340-be9-11e8-bada-b8bbfa3568a2 "data-title =" RED HYDROGEN ICONS "src =" https://o.aolcdn.com/images/dims ? crop = 1600% 2C1068% 2C0% 2C0 & quality = 85 & format = jpg & resize = 1600 %%%%%%%%%; 2C1066

Of course, there is also the modular aspect of hydrogen. The company plans to launch a hydrogen camera in 2019. When I spoke to Jannard, he came up with an accessory with a large sensor that could support real DSLR lenses and without a mirror . But by 2019, Hydrogen 's Snapdragon 835 will be two years old and, even though this accessory is half an inch thick, we will be talking about a package that looks too bad for the size of the product. A mirrorless camera APS-C, like the Sony a6500. And since Hydrogen does not include significant film benefits like impressive colors, real-time grading, or granular shooting options, there just does not seem to be a real value proposition.

As I said above, the idea of ​​building a camera on the hardware of a smartphone is not a bad thing. But with an exorbitant price of $ 1,295, hydrogen enters a saturated market of more affordable options with excellent cameras like the Galaxy S9, as well as excellent compact cameras like the Sony RX100. And since RED offers nothing more to creators of mobile content than an isolated 3D experience, I can not recommend it.

[ad_2]
Source link