High speed modes

One of the headline features of the Mate 30 Pro is its super slow motion capabilities. Most smartphones available on the market today, if they offer slow motion, do it at either 120 fps, 240 fps, or up to 960 fps. This typically comes in the form of a sensor and system that can take 120 frames per second video and do clever interpolation to appear as if it is a higher frame rate. We’ve seen some good and bad solutions here.

The way that traditional slow motion cameras work is on a sliding scale – the trade-off between frame rate is resolution. If you reduce the area of the sensor that needs to take the image by one quarter, then technically the fast memory storing the video data can store 4x as much – as long as you can poll data from the sensor at 4x the speed, it should be good to go.

It seems that Huawei is doing a mix of things here to get 7680 fps. The camera offers several settings, which comes with a slider from 2x to 256x. Any setting 32x or lower gives a 1080p video, while 64x and higher gives a 720p video:

• 1080p at 120 fps = 4x speedup
• 1080p at 240 fps = 8x speedup
• 1080p at 960 fps = 32x speedup
• 720p at 1920 fps = 64x speedup
• 720p at 7680 fps = 256x speedup