why does the video mode on my smartphone camera zoom in compared to the photos mode (single lens camera)
In: Technology
It could be because of video stabilisation. It will crop a certain amount of the outer pixels of each frame in order to keep the video looking straight
camera sensors are made up of lots and lots of little light-collecting buckets called pixels. the total number of pixels in a sensor is usually in the millions, and we refer to those quantities as megapixels (mega- means “million”).
digital still images can be made up of any number of pixels, but videos have a more restrictive and specific set of rules. a “full HD” video, for example, must be exactly 1920 pixels wide by 1080 pixels high. if you multiply 1920 by 1080, you get just a little bit over two million.
your camera’s sensor is larger than 2 megapixels for a lot of reasons, but they all add up to “because more than 2 megapixels looks better.” when you shoot an HD video, however, there’s no reason to use the whole sensor since HD video only needs a 2 megapixel image.
so, when you flip to video mode, the camera just uses the middle of the sensor, and ignores all the pixels around the edges. the lens doesn’t change, though, so light coming into the camera is still covering the whole sensor. when you clip out the middle of the whole image into a 2 megapixel size rectangle, and throw away the edges, that has the effect of zooming in, since you’re seeing a smaller “window into the world” than if you included all the edges.
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