iPhone 8’s camera could get a big upgrade on both the front and back

Another day and another nugget of iPhone 8 information has been found in Apple’s HomePod firmware. This one tells us that the iPhone 8’s rear camera could be capable of shooting 4K video at 60fps and, surprisingly, that its front-facing one could too.

Code spotted by Portuguese news site iHelp mentions ‘4k60VideoSupported’ along with the identifiers ‘back’ and ‘front’, strongly suggesting that the video upgrade will apply to both cameras.

That would be an improvement for the rear camera, which on the iPhone 7 can shoot 4K footage but only at 30fps, and a massive jump for the front-facing camera, which on the iPhone 7 can only shoot video at up to 1080p.

Better footage in a smaller size

If you’re a budding videographer this could be a big deal, and the code also mentions support for the HEVC file type, which can store content in a much smaller file size. 4K videos tend to eat up a lot of storage space, so that should be useful too if you plan to keep many of them on your iPhone.

As ever we can’t be certain this information is accurate, or even that it’s referring to the iPhone 8, but it’s seemingly been found in Apple firmware, so there’s a good chance it will prove true.

With other iPhone 8 camera rumors pointing to a dual-lens camera and augmented reality features, along with a clever ‘SmartCam’ feature for automatic scene detection, the iPhone 8’s camera could well be a huge improvement on the already-impressive iPhone 7 one, and even substantially better than the dual-lens one on the iPhone 7 Plus.

We might not even have too long a wait to find out just how good it is as a recent Apple earnings call suggests the iPhone 8 could land in September.