Centosphere
JD-EE,
"Centrosphere, what you are seeing is compression artifacts."
Good take, but what kind of compression technique these cameras utilize? I really doubt it will be something different from the standard JPEG 4, what is a quite developed standard and delivers high picture quality. Alas, the ROV is tethered, they probably donīt have a problem with bandwidth.
Um, where did you find the raw uncompressed images to look at? All I saw were pictures taken of a video screen at a slightly oblique angle. The smooth looking area was dark. The image was jpeg. The jpeg probably smoothed the image a little. And it could also be smoothed by other effects mentioned since my comment. It's WAY premature to make anything big our of it.