When did this change? Because my Note 4 compressed videos and reduced the quality of pictures when sending through SMS. And I have always used the stock messaging app. It has made iMessage a huge deal. When I can send a 1080p video shot at 60 FPS to someone with an iPhone and it the quality isn't reduced, that's a big win. If Android could figure out how to address this, I would definitely think about switching back. But until then I can't. Unless my family and friends switch to Android too.
Sent from my iPhone 6 using Tapatalk
You're wrong.
iMessage downscales 1080p video to 720p. You can easily test this by taking a video and messaging it to yourself via iMessage. I just did so myself, over WiFi (so no use testing over Cellular, as it will result in the same thing), the video was recorded as 1080p with 30 FPS. iMessage downscaled the video to 720p. Try it. You can run similar tests on Android devices by simply sending Photos and Videos to your own Phone Number and saving the "received" version and inspecting the properties (Resolution, Bitrate, Frames/Sec, Codec, etc.).
Photos are not downscaled.
The video looks good on your phone screen because it's a tiny HD/FHD screen, but the difference in quality is noticeable on a real computer screen, like any FHD Notebook PC and especially something like a 21.5" iMac Screen.
If you have an iPhone 6 then that's likely the reason why you didn't notice it. The difference is a "little" less obvious on a smaller, lower resolution display (there is less upscaling from 720p on the iPhone 6 display compared to the 6 Plus's FHD display).
Apple does a lot of media transcoding in their software - they just NEVER tell your about it. While an MMS client on Android will say "Compressing Content," Apple simply does it automatically in the background, and never lets you know it's happening.
Android MMS Clients, at least on my Samsung devices, have been sharing Photos and Videos at a resolution at least comparable to WhatsApp for quite a while now. It's simply not that big of a deal, TBH.
Info from a 3 Second 1080p 30FPS video I iMessaged myself:
Size: 711 KB
Dimensions: 720 X 1280
CODECS: AAC, H.264
Color Profile: HD (1-1-1)
Duration: 00:03
Audio Channels: 1
Encoding Software: 8.4.1
Where From: [Redacted Phone Number], Received via Messages file transfer
Here is the info for the original video in Photos:
Size: 5.6MB
Resolution: 1080 X 1920
CODEC: H.264
Frames: 30 FPS
Duration: 00:03
If I drag the video out of Photos to my desktop:
Size: 2.4MB
Dimensions: 720 X 1280
Codecs: AAC, H.264
Color Profile: HD (1-1-1)
Duration: 00:03
Audio Channels: 1
The only way to share the original is via a third party messaging service, via email Attachment... On a Mac I have to go to iCloud.com to get the original video. If I share from Photos or Drag it out of Photos, it will downscale the video to 720 and I'll end up using or sharing the downscaled version.
It's part of the reason why I went back to iPhoto from Photos.
The best you can get from that 1080p video with iMessage is a 720p 60FPS video, but as you can see from the above, the amount of compression iOS applies to the video is significant. It basically reduced the size of the video in resolution from 1080p to 720p, and decreased the size by 5.6MB to 711KB - which is kind of massive