Most standard CMOS image sensors capture roughly 60 to 70 decibels of scene contrast. Real-world conditions often exceed that dramatically — a car emerging from a tunnel into daylight, for instance, can present a contrast range beyond 120 dB. Anything outside the sensor's native range gets recorded as either pure white or solid black, and that lost information cannot be recovered afterward through editing.

H.264 (also called AVC) is a video compression standard that stores only the differences between frames rather than encoding every frame in full. On an embedded camera module, this compression happens in dedicated hardware between the image pipeline and the output interface — meaning the host only ever receives compressed data, and encoding settings live on the camera itself rather than in host-side software.