HD video is all well and good, but lo-fi digital video has a charm all of its own:

Camera phone technology moves fast. You can get full HD, 240 frames per second on an iPhone 6 but the above was shot using a 7 years old Samsung D600 camera phone. The Samsung lets you record in lo-fi Common Intermediate Format (CIF) at 352 x 288 pixels but also, and much more interestingly, at Sub-quarter CIF format: 128 x 96 pixels.¹ This is what the above was shot using. The phone was blue-tacked to a tripod. The battery died quickly.

If the camera moves then you get to see the picture constantly being broken down and remade as the camera tries to keep up.² That’s mainly why I adopted the pan and tilt approach, but I was slightly riffing on Michael Snow’s La Region Centrale.

HD video tries to break down the gulf between the viewer and the viewed but this low-res video, straining to create a coherent series of images out of data, shows clearly that this is a piece of technology rather than a window onto the world. I wonder if this allows it to achieve a level of authenticity that HD video lacks. Either way, I think that there’s a lot of scope for obtaining lovely effects from somewhat unloved and unlovely “old” camera phones. Next up will be my old Sony Ericsson w810i…

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1. This is the end of the technical stuff, mainly because it’s the end of my understanding of the technical stuff.

2. This is not a technical explanation.