The issue is sites like Youtube. They are formatted for landscape movies. If they were smart, they would have a portrait and landscape mode, and switch on-the-fly.
It goes deeper than that. The issue is that the sky and ground are boring but objects spaced horizontally in our field of view are interesting. Holding a phone in portrait mode is appropriate for taking a photo of a person, AKA “a portrait”, but it is not appropriate for filming landscapes or general activities. It’s not annoying because we’re not used to it, or because there are black bars, it is annoying because you are cutting off important bits of the scene that give context to the action and replacing it with boring sky and ground.
Technically, the sensor in smartphones is often built directly into an integrated circuit chip, which is soldered directly to the internal circuit board – the logic on the chip does some/most of the processing for the photos. So the idea of rotating the chip is difficult, because there are a whole lot of electronic circuit traces that have to be kept conducting.
Also, this would require adding a small motor, and flexible circuit connections to the phone. Thus likely making it thicker & heavier. And manufacturers have been working for smaller & lighter phones for decades.
Those are the technical problems.
The economic problem is that this isn’t a critical feature that would lead to a lot more people buying their phone. Other features could be added for the same cost in weight & circuitry that might be more attractive to buyers.
So the usual answer to questions like “why don’t they make …” applies: people aren’t willing to pay more for that.
Nobody’s been talking about an actual mechanically rotating sensor, just using a square (or squareish) sensor and rotating/cropping the video in software.
This problem extends past even cellphones, TV’s are 16:9 as a compromise format, because it could represent popular aspect ratios.
The idea was to have black bars on most content, but consumers found this unacceptable as it was “wasting” screen space that they paid for, which pretty much forced the hand of content creators to move to the 16:9 aspect ratio.
Even if they shoot in other formats, for cinema as an example they will resort to “shoot and protect”, where the main action will all happen within a 16:9 area to avoid issues when people zoom in content to avoid those black bars. Even if a director makes the creative choice to use Panavision or CinemaScope they have to limit the critical components to the least common denominator of 16:9 for new content.
But as others have mentioned, cell phones target the instant camera market and simplified controls and interface will overrule more advanced functions. A greater number of users would be unhappy with the disconnect of the physical orientation from the cameras view than will have issues with turning the phone.
There have been a few attempts to produce cell phones targeted at a higher market point but they have been flops so I doubt this will change soon.
The app (but not the website) will automatically show you a vertical video in portrait mode. If videos suffer from VVS, websites suffer from Horizontal Website Syndrome even more… so it makes sense to use the app
Is that a fair generalization? You could also say that many horizontal videos include unnecessary background and miss out on the speaker’s facial expressions and body language.
Photo composition just isn’t a thing most people are trained to do… portrait or horizontal.
All IMHO:
I think it is fair in general. There is a reason we tend towards wider rather than narrower TVs and movie aspect ratios. Everything we are interested in is largely horizontal. Plonk yourself down in the African plains and get a feel for your surroundings, do you spend most of your time looking around you or up and down? We see in landscape. Our visual field is approximately 210º horizontally and 150º vertically.
Should we always film in landscape? No, but I think landscape is a far better default than portrait. My monitor and most other people’s monitors are landscape because it feels more natural to have things arranged side by side rather than vertically.
If I’m looking at a video on a computer, it doesn’t matter a damn if the website shows black bars or not. If I expand the video to full screen and it is in portrait, it doesn’t fit my monitor properly, the bars happen anyway.
If you think the ordinary portrait-oriented smartphone video clip is bad, I once saw a clip on YouTube that was not only in portrait orientation but also made by pointing the camera at glass-tube TV from across the room. What you were supposed to watch–the entire point of making the video in the first place–was in that tiny image of a TV screen, in the middle of a portrait mode image, in between enormous black bars.
ETA: At least if you watch a portrait-mode clip on another smartphone, you may be able to switch to full screen mode which eliminates the bars and allows you to see the clip the same way as the person who made it. At least, the YouTube app on my phone does this.