Comment by endorphone | Hacker News Reader

Comment by endorphone | Hacker News Reader

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5-axis OIS system absolutely correct for rotation (e.g. roll), as of course sensor-shift and rotation is a component of OIS.

The point is not that EIS is better than OIS - the systems serve different purposes

They serve remarkably similar purposes and can be complimentary. It's actually interesting because your claims sound like what Google said with the Pixel (1) and its completely substandard EIS-based solution. With the pixel 2 they added OIS and complement it with EIS. Everyone eventually gets to OIS + EIS. But while they're trying to be cheap we hear the spiel about why they just don't need OIS.

Because EIS alone is substandard unless you have a fantastically fast sensor or perfect lighting. Which is why EIS samples are always on the brightest possible days. It isn't by accident.

EIS is more akin to a poor-man's gimbal than it is to OIS, and that's the purpose it serves in GoPros. One could argue that for sufficiently small range of movement a gimbal and OIS can serve similar purposes for stills photography - a gimbal after all is a form of external stabilization. However EIS is not seriously applicable to stills photography as it does nothing for a standalone capture and OIS cannot replace a gimbal (or EIS) for video capture other than in very narrow scenarios where static support would generally be a better solution.

It's obvious that OIS + EIS > EIS. However it's not that case that OIS > EIS for all applications. One could argue that given just OIS one could apply EIS in post, but that's just a different implementation of OIS + EIS.

As far as I know, the GoPro is fixed-focus - there's no moving parts in its optical system. Adding mechanical stabilization whether optical or sensor-based would reduce the durability of a system of which one of the main criteria is being able to withstand repeated impacts. Maybe it's possible to build a sufficiently ruggedized OIS solution, but it's not clear whether the expense or size/weight of that would make it viable for action cameras.

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