Vratislav Holub Every year, Apple introduces a new generation of its Apple iPhones, which come with a greater or lesser number of interesting novelties, changes and improvements. During the last few years, Apple users have therefore seen a fairly fundamental shift forward, not only in terms of performance or display quality, but also in terms of camera quality, connectivity and many others. Cameras are playing an increasingly important role for leading smartphone manufacturers, thanks to which we can observe incredible progress in this category.
Of course, Apple is no exception in this regard. If we put, for example, the iPhone X (2017) and the current iPhone 14 Pro side by side, we will see literally extreme differences in the photos. The same is true of video recording. Today's Apple phones have a number of great gadgets, from audio zoom, to film mode, to precise stabilization or action mode. Although we have seen a number of gadgets in recent years, there is still one potential change that has been constantly talked about in recent years. According to various leaks and speculations, Apple is going to allow iPhones to shoot in 8K resolution. This, on the other hand, raises a lot of questions. Do we even need something like this, or who can use this change and does it actually make sense?
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Adam Kos Filming in 8K
With an iPhone, you can shoot in maximum 4K resolution at 60 frames per second (fps). However, as we mentioned above, there has been speculation for a long time that the new generation could fundamentally push this limit - from the current 4K to 8K. Before we focus directly on usability itself, we certainly must not forget to mention that it would not actually be anything that groundbreaking. There have been phones on the market for a long time that can handle shooting in 8K. Specifically, this applies to, for example, the Samsung Galaxy S23, Xiaomi 13 and a number of other (even older) models. With the arrival of this improvement, Apple phones would be able to record even more high-quality videos with a greater number of pixels, which would overall raise their quality to a higher level. Even so, fans are not eager for news.
Although the phone's ability to film in 8K resolution looks wonderful on paper, its real usability is not so happy, on the contrary. The world is not ready for such a high resolution, at least for now. 4K screens and TVs are just beginning to gain prominence, and many users still rely on the years-popular Full HD (1920 x 1080 pixels). We can come across higher quality screens mainly in the TV segment. It is here that 4K is slowly taking hold, while TVs with 8K resolution are still more or less in their infancy. Although some phones can handle recording 8K video, the problem is that you have nowhere to play it afterwards.
Movie mode from iPhone 13 (Pro)
Is 8K what we want?
Bottom line, shooting video in 8K resolution doesn't quite make sense yet. In addition, current videos in 4K resolution can take up a significant part of free space. The arrival of 8K would literally kill the storage of today's smartphones - especially considering that the usability is extremely low for now. On the other hand, the arrival of such news makes more or less sense. Apple could thus insure itself for the future. However, this brings us to a second potential problem. It is a question of when the world will be ready for the transition to 8K displays, or when they will be affordable. It can be assumed that this will not happen very soon, which leads to the risk of higher costs for iPhone cameras, which would have such an option, with a bit of exaggeration, "unnecessarily".
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Flying around the world with Apple Some apple growers look at it from a slightly different point of view. According to them, the arrival of 8K may not be harmful, but with regard to video resolution, a slightly different change is rather proposed, which could have a greater effect on the satisfaction of apple users. If you want to film using your iPhone, you can of course set the quality - resolution, number of frames per second and format. In the case of video recording, if we ignore fps, 720p HD, 1080p Full HD and 4K are offered. And it is in this respect that Apple could fill the imaginary gap and bring the option for recording in 1440p resolution. However, even this has its opponents. On the other hand, they claim that this is not a widely used resolution, which would make it a useless novelty.
Rather, I see the benefit in the subsequent post-processing, where in 8k I have more possibilities as a creator to crop the scene or use it to zoom if I export the video to FullHD/4k.