Description

A lot of people here in the comments love to bash someone's video on the quality side of things.

Most sightings are at night, when the lights are visible, most of people who record these do so with their smartphones, some have new models, some others have older models and different brands.

I read a lot of comments saying "in the age of 4K and the video looks so bad" or "with such great smartphones and we always get a blurry video".

Phone camera sensors are small, really small, and what makes the quality go up is nothing but computational photography, suffice to say, if the sensor can't extract information at night, on some random lights in the sky, then the video won't look good.

The sensor size of a smartphone, for most of them, is 5.76mm x 4.29mm, the sensor size on a full frame camera is 36mm x 24mm. 34 times the area of a regular phone sensor.


The video captured above, was shot on my Canon EOS R6 with a Canon EF 85mm f1.8 lens it lets in a lot of light and the sensor should do the thing, still, for me to get some satellites passing in front of the lens I had to crank up the ISO to 102400, open the lens to its maximum f/1.8 and have a shutter speed of 1/15 for video (at 23.98 fps) this at 4K resolution.

As you can see, it is really hard to make sense of anything and the quality is bad, really bad. Unless people are going about with really expensive IR cameras everywhere they go in their pocket it makes no point in bashing the video quality of anyone's video. If even this setup can't make good video, what can that is on everyone's pocket daily? I myself own an iPhone XR of all things...it shoots 4K but...what will happen when I apply digital zoom to the thing like most people do?