Adobe AIR Development

[AppStoreLover]

Dual Full 1080P HD video recording is one of the strong suits of the PlayBook.

RIM vaguely says "1080P HD Video". The end users think it just supports 1080 HD video playback. 

When it does 1080P HD Video Recording, why not clearly say "1080P HD Video Recording"? 

RIM is so poor at marketing, it makes me a bit sad.

iPad 2 page proudly displays "720p HD video recording". PlayBook is way superior. 

[peter9477]

My guess?  Someone at RIM thought that saying "1080P HD Video" captured in fewer words what you maybe think should have been "1080P HD Video Playback and 1080P HD Video Recording on both front and rear cameras (which also do pretty good still images, in case that wasn't clear too)".

But I'm sure you're right that you'd be better at marketing this than RIM would. ;-)

[nobleRobot]

The device does technically support 1080p video playback through its HDMI port. I suppose as long as the specs also list the screen resolution (1024x600), I don't think that "1080p HD Video" is deceptive (just like listing "8MP" on my phone doesn't mean to imply that the screen is 8MP, too).

EDIT: Oh, I didn't catch you meaning there. I guess you have a point in that RIM should be specifically promoting the ability to record 1080p, but I thought that they were. I mean, most of the video demos mention it, and all ofthe press releases do, too. I think, like Peter said, this is a case of "brochure brevity."

[macwarrior]

It's just a buzzword anyway. I'm interested to see what the camera's quality actually is, because most of the cell phone-sized 1080p cameras have terrible low-light performance and high compression, so you can't even get all 2 megapixels from the stream.

Most cameras on cell phones and the like would benefit way more from good lenses and a larger sensor than from cramming more physical pixels into the sensor. Those plastic pinholes are going to lower your effective resolution to under 3 megapixels no matter what the sensor says, and combine that with the compression required to store a 1080p video stream in any reasonable size and simultaneously maintaining 30fps in low-light conditions...yeah, you're probably not getting more than half what they're selling in true optical measured resolution.

Are people really going to be buying the playbook because of its video abilities anyway? Anyone who's marginally serious about video will buy an actual camera, and people who aren't probably won't use the video function more than a few times a year. I just don't see it as a major selling point, at least not until there's some truly cross-platform (ie windows, OS X, iOS, android and BB) video chat software.

[thesmileman]

Done worry about the space, i'm sure at 1080p @30fps on our dev 16GB playbooks we should get a solid 45-60 seconds of video.

[Kai001]

Actually you could probably fit atleast 3 and a half hours of high-quality HD 1080p compressed video in 16GBs.

[macwarrior]

I've got an EOS 5D mark II, which shoots (in terms of compression) about the lowest limit of what is considered film-quality HD. It can store 12 minutes of video on a 4GB SD card. So if you're content with about 40 minutes of video and nothing else...

I just don't really see the need for shooting in 1080p at a higher compression ratio when you could be doing 720p at a lower rate and have the same effective resolution but with less storage space required.

[Kai001]

Well it sounds fine to me. Just move your videos to your PC every night. Batch encode them to h.264 or MP4 if they're large just an idea.