One of the great new features of the iPhone 3GS is its ability to shoot video (VGA up to 30 fps with audio) - and do it really well. From all the video demonstrations on YouTube it is easy to see the video quality is really good for a phone. So that got me thinking – what about those of us with the iPhone 3G or the first generation iPhone. What options do we have? Well there is an App available on Cydia for jailbroken phones called Cycorder. It allows the iPhone to shoot video. But what’s the quality like? I put it to the test this afternoon and was very surprised with the results.
First let me again say this App is only available for jailbroken iPhones. I’ll cover that in a future post. So lets go over the specs of this program. It uses the iPhone’s camera and shoots pictures as fast as the camera can handle. This allows anywhere from 7 to 15 frames per second depending on the lighting conditions. It also supports audio.
Lets get to the tests. I took my iPhone 3G out to my cousins baseball game this afternoon. It was partly sunny and quite windy at times. The first test was to shoot a portion of the game from where I was sitting. I wasn’t that close to the action, but wasn’t that far away either. Here is what it looks like.
To me, the video quality isn’t all that good – which surprised me. I though if any of the video was going to be crisp it would be the stuff shot at a distance. However, when I watch the video it doesn’t look crisp at all. It looks flat and dull. I was expecting a little more from what I had read online about the Cycorder App. However, as you can hear, the audio is great. It really picks up a lot of the ambient sound. I actually had to drop it into iMovie and lower the volume in the middle section because since I was recording the video, my voice was very loud and over modulated.
Next I decided to try some close up video – and boy was I surprised at the quality.
Wow! Now that’s what I expected to see in the first video. The video is crisp and the camera does a good job with white balance and contrast. Sure it’s a little choppy, but with the App maxing out at 15 frames per second, it really is good quality. I am more than impressed. So if you’re like me and have the iPhone 3G or if you have the first generation iPhone and you want to shoot video, Cycorder is a very good App.
