[ceejayoz]

> makes you wonder why the imagery floating around with reporting on war zones and incidents are of such bullshit quality.

Hard to say what you're talking about without examples, but stuff like military targeting cameras are frequently 1970s tech, and looking via infrared to boot. There's plenty of high-res footage from war zones available.

> even the supposedly recorded-with-mobile footage is always so bad. as if the person is stumbling around not knowing their phone's cammera is rolling.

Being shot at has that sort of effect. That said, there's some pretty remarkable 4k drone footage coming out of ISIS these days, along with lots of GoPro footage.