What if Apple makes an action cam to play GoPro?

The photos below by designer Antonio DeRosa show us an Apple-branded action cam, which, if seen in real life, would face off against other names like GoPro and win unequivocally. argue. Its rounded corners in white and black colors remind us of the design of the original iPod or the original iPhone. Recently, Apple tends to design products with stiffer edges, like on the iPhone 12, the iPad Pro line, or the latest iMac M1 model. Still, the rounded design looks great, matches an action cam, and shows that Apple can completely dominate this category.

DeRosa’s AirCam has an LCD screen on the front, which is “cemented” from the Apple Watch. It can be used to display shooting parameters, or as a small selfie screen. The back of the device has a larger screen with an interface similar to an iPhone. This screen will be used to display the preview image, as well as the control menu with options: still image, video, preview image, and settings.

There is a shutter button on the top of the device, while the USB-C port and SDHC memory card slot are located on either side. Other AirCam functions include the voice assistant Siri and Memoji. DeRosa also offers four more color options, unlike the colors of recent iPhone models. AirCam green is almost identical to military blue, while pink is identical to gum color.

Apple obviously hasn’t released an action cam product yet, but the idea doesn’t sound crazy either. Until now, Apple has always been known for the quality of the camera on the phone. The 3-lens camera cluster on the iPhone 12 Pro Max is not only good phone cameras, they deserve to be the world’s top optical devices.

The image sensors used on conventional action cams are not much larger than those on phones. For example, the GoPro uses a 1 / 2.3-inch sensor on all recent action cam models, where the latest model has a 16mm f / 2.8 lens with 4K video recording at 60fps (Hero 8) or 5K at 30fps (Hero 9). The DJI Osmo action cam model also uses a 1 / 2.3 sensor.

The main camera on the iPhone 12 Pro Max has a sensor with 1.7 um pixels. With a resolution of 12 million pixels, it is possible to calculate that the sensor is almost 1/2-inch in size – larger than the GoPro. And while the camera on the iPhone 12 Pro Max has a 26mm f / 1.6 lens, the ultra-wide camera uses a 13mm equivalent lens.

The iPhone is also capable of recording 4K video at 60fps, which means it perfectly satisfies the users’ video recording needs. However, there are more powerful cam actions like that. For example, the Sony RX0 has a 1-inch sensor, and the iPhone has yet to capture 5K video like the GoPro models. So even though Apple’s cameras have the potential to put in action cam – or even drones – perhaps right now is not the right time. Let’s hope we guessed wrong!

Reference: T3