iLounge

By Jeremy Horwitz

Editor-in-Chief, iLounge
Published: Tuesday, June 23, 2009
News Category: iPhone

In addition to the hundreds of photographs and screenshots posted to accompany the release of the iPhone 3GS last week, iLounge posted new video clips comparing the performance of the iPhone 3GS video camera to two other types of video recording devices. One, a Canon PowerShot SD700IS camera, is designed to let viewers see how the new iPhone 3GS’s 640x480 camera compares to the 640x480 recordings of a three-year old pocket point-and-shoot camera. The second, a Flip UltraHD camera, lets viewers see the differences between the iPhone 3GS and a dedicated consumer video recording device in resolution, focus, and color rendition.

Unfortunately, video sharing services Flickr and Vimeo have been experiencing issues importing clips created by the iPhone 3GS. Vimeo users have reported that iPhone 3GS videos are missing audio, are presented upside-down, and/or are not converting at all, while users of Flickr have found videos easy to convert but sometimes presented upside-down. This appears to be due to an iPhone 3GS orientation setting that is saved by the iPhone but not properly processed by video sharing services. One of our videos can be seen in this orientation. Because of the importation issues, our iPhone 3GS videos are on both Flickr and Vimeo, with non-3GS videos on Vimeo. Use of iMovie to import and then export the videos is a potential workaround while the services work to accommodate the video changes.

Separately, iLounge sample videos uploaded to YouTube offer a look at the iPhone 3GS’s automatic transcoding for faster transfer and easier viewing, without orientation glitches, but with lower resolution and more visual artifacts.