Anyway, what I wanted to ask.. how do they go around the loss of quality? It's not a simple crop? Can they somehow utilize any part of the chip they want (as long as the maximum is the same?) since the chip is much bigger than the max possible video it can record?
This is an obvious idea that everyone has been craving for, and I don't think such ideas deserve patents. If stock cameras adopt this idea, tough luck, they'll just have to compete like everyone else and add more differentiation.
It's not the implementation that matters here, it's the idea. And companies can do their own implementations of it. They don't have to license it.
And my first assumption was that they do something more than cropping, in other words that the implementation is not trivial. But I learned that might not be the case.
Who says they do? The app seems to show the entire input so I don't think there could be anything tricky in terms of using only part of the sensor.
They advertise certain resolution. I assumed it's for the final video. If they just crop it and stretch it.. that's disappointing.