Samsung Galaxy Note 3 set for 4K camera, due next week

Samsung's next slab of hotness is set to capture 4K Ultra HD video -- the Galaxy Note 3 will have a 4K camera, according to industry insiders quoted by the Korea Economic Daily.

Due to be unveiled next week, the Note 3 is the heavily rumoured but so far unannounced sequel to the enormous, powerful and generally not to be messed with Galaxy Note 2. A superphone for power users, it's perhaps logical (in a mutually assured destruction kind of way) that it's bumping up its video capturing abilities to Ultra HD.

It's not the first phone we've heard of capturing the ridiculously high-res footage. Sony's rumoured Xperia i1 is likely to do the same, if a leaked system dump is to be believed. 

4K Ultra HD is the consumer standard for the next step up from 1080p, aka Full HD. It means video with a resolution of 3,840x2,160 pixels, which is double the number of vertical lines as 1080p. It's double the horizontal resolution too, so it's four times the number of flashing dots. The term 4K comes from the horizontal resolution being nearly 4,000 pixels (it's more in some formats with different aspect ratios).

It's not a huge resolution for a still image. Maths fans among you will have worked out that 3,840x2,160 pixels equals 8.3 megapixels -- a pretty middling resolution for a smart phone these days. The Note 3 will have to have a camera at least that sharp to capture Ultra HD, which shouldn't be a problem, as it's rumoured to pack a 13-megapixel sensor.

The difficulty is in including enough storage to record 24 or more frames that large every second. Depending on the compression and file formats used, you could be eating up tens of gigabytes every minute, meaning you'd have to carry around fistfuls of microSD cards.

Also, you'll need a 4K Ultra HD TV to watch your high-res opus and inflict it on your friends. That'll set you back about £4,000, appropriately enough.

Other leaked specs for the Note 3, pictured above in a leak, include a mighty Snapdragon 800 quad-core processor -- or possibly Samsung's own eight-core Exynos beast, depending on where in the world you live -- and a whopping 3GB of RAM.

We'll almost certainly see it for the first time at Samsung's next Unpacked event on 4 September in Berlin. CNET will be there in numbers, delivering high-speed, top-notch coverage with live blogs, photos and hands-on videos up the ying-yang.

Are you excited about recording 4K on your phone? Or does it seem a little over the top for a mobile movie? Let me know in the comments, or on our high-resolution Facebook page.