Why are smartphone cameras oriented “incorrectly”?

1 points by arielweisberg ↗ HN
Given the ergos of a smartphone you would think that holding the phone vertically would result in landscape videos and images. This how the Flip video recorders did it.

Rotating the phone results in your fingers covering the lense and microphone and makes it difficult or impossible to reach the controls while also providing a solid shooting platform.

I feel like the proliferation of vertical video on YouTube (where it isn't a style choice) is evidence enough that a simple hardware modification would make most lives easier and most video and images more aesthetic.

It's not surprising to me that the standard orientation hasn't changed, but it is surprising to me that no handset manufacturer has tried something like this or even better given the option of recording video as portrait or landscape without rotating the phone by throwing a few more dollars of sensor and lense at it the problem.

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