The new iPhone 4S shoots 1080/30p video. No, I'm not saying you should use it to shoot a narrative film, but in terms of ubiquity we're going to see a lot of footage from the 4S going forward -- as an indicator of this ubiquity, the iPhone 4 is the single most popular camera on flickr. Those blurry cameraphone videos used on the news for eyewitness reports are certainly going to be a lot sharper, but how does the much-hyped new lens fare against the video quality of a Canon 5D Mark II? Here's a shootout video from Robino Films, who set both cameras up on the same tripod and rolled simultaneous video:
No, you're not going to use the iPhone instead of a dedicated video camera, but along with the glut of new Android phones, cameraphone video is leaps and bounds better than it was just a year ago. You can also download the 1080p source file on Vimeo (right-hand side).
UPDATE: Check out this short film shot on the iPhone 4S. Yes, if you get really close to objects, you can get a shallow depth-of-field look even with a sensor size this small.
As a sidenote, a recent commenter accused me of covering Apple products too much on this site, but my Google Analytics data shows that a whopping 63% of visitors here are on a Mac or iOS device (54% of which is a Mac proper, compared to 13% Mac marketshare in the U.S.). Given No Film School readers are four times more likely to use a Mac than the national average, I think it's safe to say I'm not pushing a personal agenda but rather trying to serve my audience. So, Apple users, here is another video comparing the iPhone 4S's video quality to that of the iPhone 4:
I'll also be curious to see how far third party apps are able to push the sensor, hopefully brining more manual controls to the table. And not to make this post too Apple-specific, here's a shootout video from Engadget comparing the iPhone 4S's video to several other current cameraphones:
