4K Cameras - Should I Pony Up And Get The Higher End Model Of Drone?
4K cameras are nothing new, even in the world of aerial photography, but there still hasn’t been enough talk about them. For most people, the question of whether they should use them or not has remained unanswered. That’s why we’ll try to outline the most important advantages and disadvantages of such cameras.
Advantages of 4K cameras Like The DJI Inspire 1 and Phantom 3 Professional
Such cameras are capable of producing Ultra High Definition images that come in two basic sizes: 1920 X 1080 and 3840 X 2160 pixels, which is the size of the image that appears on a 4K TV screen. Cinema 4K is even capable of producing over four billion pixels per second, which is an astonishing amount of data.
As you can see, 4K cameras are sophisticated devices capable of producing images of the highest quality, but that doesn’t answer the question of whether you should use them. To help you come to a decision, we’re going to list their disadvantages as well.
Disadvantages of 4K cameras
Your video will be viewed on a 1080 HD TV
Most people don’t have 4K TV screens, so your Ultra High Definition image or video will mostly be viewed on screens that simply aren’t capable of reproducing its quality accurately.
The storage will be a problem
Since 4K cameras work with large amounts of data, they rely heavily on codecs. Codecs are what converts the images into pixels and determines how accurately they’re going to represent them. And of course, the higher the level of accuracy, the larger the file. This basically means that you’ll have to have storage of the highest capacity in order to deal with all that data.
Uploads will take hours
One of the biggest disadvantages of 4K, at least according to most users, is the fact that it can take hours to upload a single file.
As you can see, 4K cameras have both advantages and disadvantages, but now that you’re acquainted with different aspects of using them, it shouldn’t be a problem to decide whether they’re the right choice for you.
As an aside, when you get a camera with a higher resolution, chances are you get more options at lower resolutions. For example the DJI Phantom 3 Professional has a higher transfer rate to the sd card over the other models. And when set to a lower resolution like 1080p, you can increase the frame rate to 60 frames per second, very useful for making slow mo or shooting fast flying and action shots.
