2010s

Why the 2010s look like this

At the start of the decade a phone could shoot HD video, and within a few years it was the only camera most people carried. The pictures got sharper every year, but they kept a family resemblance, and it comes from three things: the sensor, the processing and the network.

The sensor was a tiny CMOS chip. Unlike the CCDs before it, a CMOS sensor reads the picture out one row at a time, top to bottom. If the camera or the subject moves during that readout, each row is taken a little later than the one above it. Vertical lines lean during a pan, a fast car looks sheared, and a shaky hand makes the whole frame wobble like jelly. That is rolling shutter, and it is the fingerprint of the decade's video, from phones to action cameras to large-sensor cameras.

The processing tried to hide how small the sensor was. Phones sharpened hard, which gives the crisp but slightly crunchy edges of a 2012 clip. In low light they turned up the gain and then smoothed away the noise, so faces became waxy and dark corners turned to mush. Stabilization improved through the decade, from almost none to a picture that floats steadily as you walk.

The network did the rest. Almost every clip was uploaded, and video sites compressed it again to save bandwidth. Live streaming from a phone, which spread in the middle of the decade, adjusted its quality to the connection from second to second: blocks bloomed when the signal dropped, and sometimes a frame simply didn't arrive.

Outside the phone, two cameras shaped the look of the decade. Large-sensor stills cameras that shot video at 24 frames a second gave independent filmmakers a shallow, cinematic focus for little money; by mid-decade compact mirrorless bodies recorded 4K. Small action cameras with very wide lenses went on helmets and surfboards and bent the horizon into a curve.

Photos followed the same path. From 2010, square filter apps made the warm, vignetted square the picture of the moment; the square stayed the rule on the best-known of them until 2015. Film-emulation presets with faded blacks and grain followed in 2012. Front cameras made the selfie, beauty filters smoothed it, portrait modes (2016) blurred the background with software, and night modes (2018) stacked many frames to see in the dark. And, as a reaction, instant film came back.

What the camera rebuilds

With the DECADE dial on 2010, the base recipe is a 1080p phone: HD color, light compression, strong sharpening, some sensor noise, and rolling-shutter skew. The TECHNOLOGY dial changes the balance. Early Smartphone 720p is softer and more compressed. Rolling-Shutter Handheld pushes the skew and the shake together. Action Camera Wide Angle adds strong barrel distortion. Mobile Live Stream adds heavy blocks and drops frames now and then. Low-Light Smartphone raises noise and oversharpening, and Stabilized Smartphone Video adds almost no shake of its own.

In STILL, the styles reproduce the processing: oversharpened edges, smeared noise reduction, compression blocks and lens distortion. Square Filter App crops square with a warm cast and dark corners. Film Emulation Preset adds grain and a matte fade. Portrait and full-frame styles add a soft blur that grows toward the top and bottom of the frame; the app has no depth map, so the blur doesn't follow your subject's outline.

With SOUND on PERIOD, your voice goes through an early smartphone microphone: a band from about 100 Hz to 16 kHz, so the bass is thin, with a little microphone noise underneath. There is no tape and no motor, so SILENT really is silent here.

Shooting tips

• Concert, 2012. Low-Light Smartphone at DEGREE 9, arm up, from the middle of the crowd. Pan toward the stage while the rolling shutter leans the picture back and forth.
• Bike ride. Action Camera Wide Angle with FORMAT on 16:9, phone held low near the handlebars.
• Short film look. Consumer DSLR Video runs at 24 frames a second. Keep DEGREE around 6 for a gentler rolling-shutter lean, and move slowly.
• Feed post. In STILL, Square Filter App on a sunny café table, or Instant Film Revival at a party with FLASH on.
• Bad connection. Mobile Live Stream at DEGREE 11 looks like a broadcast from a basement with one bar of signal.

Step back to the camcorders and CCD compacts of the 2000s, or forward to the computational phones of the 2020s. For how the looks are built, see how it works.