Is the camera somehow always on?
In: Technology
If you’re referring to Live Photos on iPhone devices, then the camera is always on while the Camera app is open since that would be necessary for you to be able to compose your photo on the screen. Live Photos can easily just keep the last few seconds in memory and use that once the capture button is pressed.
The camera is always on. That’s how you’re able to see the photo you’re about to take on screen.
Film cameras didn’t have displays that showed what you’d capture, they had a little viewfinder you’d close one eye to look through like a telescope. That’s why old people hold their hands up to their face when they do a “take photo” gesture.
The only difference between taking a live photo, and a normal one is when the phone chooses to save things to the phone’s storage. Your camera is already always active (hence why you can see it), when you’re in the camera app.
When you take a live photo, all it’s doing is saying “this is roughly when what I wanted happened”, rather than “I WANT THIS EXACT SECOND”. When you then go to edit it, you’re just editing a very small video, with some fancy tools to turn it into what we would normally call a GIF.
The technology is similar to things used to capture cool moments in video games, where the system is constantly recording to memory, and removing it as it becomes unnecessary. You then press a button and it says “that was cool, record that”, and they also usually add a few extra seconds after the button press, depending on settings.
Think about Xbox game clips, the moment you turn on the console it starts recording, when in reaches 5 minutes it starts to delete from the first seconds and replacing it with the new recorded one so that whenever you press the button, you’ll have exactly the last 5 minutes.
Now back to live pictures, same thing. The camera app is Continually recording the last few seconds when it’s in live mode and whenever you hit the button, you get those seconds with your photo.
There is a small buffer of video that is stored in memory and when you decide to “capture” the image, the stored buffer video is saved along with the image capture.
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