Owners of selected Lumia smartphones will be able to start shooting video at 4K quality with a new software update.
The Denim software update, announced in September, is starting to be rolled out to owners of the Lumia 830, Lumia 930, Lumia Icon and Lumia 1520 handsets. Microsoft says a wider rollout of the software to all Lumia handset owners will begin in January.
The standout feature is the 4K video recording, which shoots short snippets of footage at the ultra-high resolution. “A long press of the camera button automatically starts 4K-quality video recording at 24 frames per second,” says a Microsoft blog announcing the new software. “With each frame at 8.3 megapixels, you can save individual frames as high-quality still images.”
The Lumia 830’s camera isn’t capable of 4K capture, however, and will instead fall back to Full HD.
Other new features include enhancements to still photography, including “Rich Capture”, which automatically throws the camera into advanced shooting modes such as HDR or Dynamic Flash when appropriate. Microsoft also claims it has tweaked the imaging alogrithms to “capture even crisper photos in daylight or low light”.
It seems that Microsoft has once again decided to try and differentiate Windows Phone from the rest of the market by (ahem) focusing on the camera features. Certainly, Windows Phone needs something to drag consumers away from Android and iOS devices. The latest figures from Kantar WorldPanel gives Windows Phone a UK market share of 7.7%, down from 11.9% a year ago. In the USA, Windows Phone has a share of only 3.6%.
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