Baywatch, meet home movies: Super-slo-mo camera mode coming to iPhone

Baywatch, here we come.

According to hints in the most recent iOS 7 beta, released last night, Apple may be including a high-speed camera option in future iPhones, including likely the coming iPhone 5S. Which means that iPhone owners will be easily and simply able create slo-mo movies, simply by playing the movie at regular speed.

Apple developer Hamza Sood discovered references to the high-speed camera today, 9to5Mac reported, indicating that iPhones would be able to record video at 120 frames per second.

If indeed Apple does bring that feature to iOS, even if only to new iPhones, it will be playing catch-up to Samsung, which has already released the capability in the Galaxy S4 with pretty spectacular capabilities:

Typically slow-motion video capture requires lower-resolution capture — the Galaxy S4’s 13-megapixel camera captures slo-mo at only 800-by-450 pixels, almost certainly due to the massive flood of visual data pouring into the camera, CPU, and Flash memory at 120 individual frames every single second.

While Apple’s iPhone 5 can almost certainly handle at least the S4’s level of data flow, the feature would not activate on 9to5Mac’s tester phone. A new iOS7 API that is publicly available to developers is 60 frames per second video capture at 720P, which is 1280-by-720 pixels.

One way Apple could differentiate itself with a coming iPhone 5S, of course, is allow full-frame slow-motion, which would be spectacular.