Monday 19 April 2021

Progress!

In 2005 Panasonic released the final version of the AG-DVX100, their last professional mini-DV standard definition camcorder.
For reference, YouTube was started in the same year, Blu-ray discs were still a year away and the first iPhone would only come out two years later.

Still, even at that time it was clear standard definition PAL and NTSC video was on its way out and would soon be overtaken in popularity by High Definition video, before that in turn was overtaken by 4K video only a few years after. It is thus clear that technology is progressing quickly and it is paramount to keep up with developments.

While resolutions were going up, devices were getting smaller, ironically creating less of a need for high resolutions to provide sharp images.
This became all to clear to me when I sent a friend a video I made last year with my AG-DVX100 through Telegram on my phone and I noticed it looked even sharper than some of the High-Definition videos I had been streaming on the phone in the previous months before.
As it turns out, the screen of my current smartphone in portrait mode is 720 pixels wide, which is exactly the same pixel width as SD video. In 14 years, technological progress has thus arrived at a point where something that came from a 15 year old, supposedly outdated and inadequate, recording device is the most natural fit for the screen of a current device meant for displaying. Due to the far superior optics and separate CCD-sensors that individually register red, green and blue wavelengths which are found in a professional camera like the AG-DVX100, the image quality also possesses a richness that exceeds anything that's expected to come from a modern phone when shown at this resolution and at this size.