eli5 why is military aircraft and weapon targeting footage always so grainy and colourless when we have such high res cameras?
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In addition to what people have said, there’s a couple more things:
Military equipment is often old. The stuff Russia and Ukraine are fighting with are mostly decades old. Of course they don’t compare to a modern cell phone, when you have a thing manufactured a couple decades ago, with technology that took years to become a finished product.
Also, the camera sensor industry is just weird.
* If you go for DSLR sized sensors, you can have amazing quality. But they’re big, so not a great fit for something that needs to fit somewhere compact.
* If you go for a high end phone you can have surprisingly good quality, because the likes of Apple and Samsung spend lots of cash on that.
But there’s surprisingly little else. Like if you get a webcam, or a driving cam, or an Arduino camera module, they’re all kind of crap. Try to get a 4K webcam, it’s barely a thing. I think there’s like 3 of them out there, and you could just buy a cheap DSLR capable of 4K recording with a much better quality at that price.
For whatever reason, there seems to be very little available of good sensors for any purpose that’s not cell phones or large sensor, pro cameras.
The U2 spyplanes have the most incredible cameras, imaging onto a 4ft square piece of chemical film.
I almost bought one of the decommissioned lenses on eBay. Incredible piece of machinery. All considering the $25,000 asking price was incredibly cheap. Size of an industrial washing machine.
Same with the stuff the geospatial agency put on satellites… the quality is doubtless obscene. 1mm resolution from near earth orbit, clean photographic quality from space… and that was 20 years ago. That’s Amazing.
So in a word, the nice looking stuff is classified, and what we see is deliberately restricted in terms of quality, particularly the recording kit, and comes from older machines. It’s often night vision.
The stuff you see on live leaks is done with antiquated machines, but it’s tried and tested, and is relatively impervious to electronic warfare systems.
I would not doubt that the most expensive stuff the spooky types use is way better than what your smartphone has got on it, and that the spooks were running 4k for video surveillance as standard in the ’80s.
As they say, “the devil’s in the details”.
Got a specific video you are referring to?
Lack of color is because most targeting is done with FLIR, which doesn’t observe color so to speak. Quality could be a lot of things, depends on the particular video.
Most footage you see is downgraded and/or heavily compressed.
This footage is a much better representation of systems like this.
– likely what you see is on purpose so you can’t see the true capabilities
– Aviation and other military hardware take YEARS to develop, test, certify, etc. So they may not always be using the latest/greatest.
– They have to be way more beefy (i.e. reliable, hardened) than say a GoPro to deal with all that goes into a military installation.
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