Kandao bring us a promising 3D camera with wide stereo base!

UPDATE: They reconsidered the quality and compatibility issues of half-SBS and chose to use the standard Full-SBS format also for photos. We asked them to also support MPO files.

There’s a new 3D camera on Kickstarter (about 26h left at the writing of this article!), that have 65 mm stereo base.

Since the Fuji W3 camera, 3D photographers want another camera with that stereo base, to avoid the limiting distance factor to get nice depth. Usually, a lot of recent 3D cameras use a very narrow stereo base, so Fuji W series owners weren’t motivated to change their camera. But Kandao, which have developed a lot of VR cameras this lasts years, are making the QooCam EGO, a real stereoscopic 3D camera (not VR180/360).

But this new camera also offers something impressive no other 3D camera offered before: recording at 60fps. Making the smoothest 3D video than any other 3D camera. Even better, the impressive bitrate of 60Mbps equals the quality of a 3D Blu-ray, but at double framerate! The video samples published at the campaign page are impressive (with links to download original files), you feel watching the footage of a Hollywood 3D camera! Also helped by stabilization, something also not seen on a 3D camera. And the low light sensitivity seems very good according to the indoor samples (and for the f/1.8 aperture), something that was also a problem of previous 3D cameras, but we’ll need more footage in darker conditions to be sure.

The photo resolution is about 4000×3000 (4K 24bit color) per eye, in 4:3 format. We don’t know why they use 4:3 aspect ratio when all 3D screens are 16:9 or wider. At the beginning of the campaign the situation was worse, they wanted to store photos in Top-Bottom format (very, very inconvenient for photos), but people complained a lot, and now they say it will be Full-SBS format. But as you can read in our previous article, this is still no convenient if we want 3D to be standard, some newer devices use each different (old) formats and ways to store and view 3D, so users need to learn different ways to use 3D on each new 3D device that use old solutions instead of the newer standards. But there’s still time to tell their engineers to support MPO (they’re still finishing the software aspect), so if people convince them, as people previously convinced them to not use stretched format; almost all 3DTVs support MPO photos. And the same for videos (example to do frame packing with MKV files, there should be similar solutions for MP4 files).

So, if you are backing their project, please, tell them to use MPO file format. This device could be a renaissance for 3D if it uses standard formats directly viewable on our 3DTVs, so if they also store video in a 2d compatible dual stream or frame interleaved/packing format, even better.

The 2d screen of the camera have an impressive PPI resolution, and that is because if you want, you can attach a 3D viewfinder (included on the package) to view your photos and videos. The camera connects to your smartphone via integrated Wi-Fi to allow editing, add effects, and upload to YouTube.

The best part of all? It’s affordable price! $369 or $289 if you hurry up and back their campaign.