Perhaps an effect from how small the pieces are? Even a "non-potato" camera will have problems with tiny things at close ranges unless you have additional lenses/equipment.
Yeah. To film a small sample properly you want a camera with manual focus such as a mirrorless and a proper macro lens. Not a setup you’d find sitting around a lab unless you were making videos like this regularly.
Yeah I have a feeling university labs aren't exactly well funded enough to just have a DSLR on hand. All of these videos are probably taken with the researcher's phone.
It's not that they aren't well enough funded to have a DSLR on hand. They'll often have very much more expensive cameras in the lab, but they'll be purpose-built into other very expensive equipment such as microscopes. It's more that a requirement to take DSLR-type photos in a lab is so very rare and unusual that they don't bother getting one, and then when there is a sudden need to take a photo of something startling, the nearest camera (the phone in the pocket) is reached for. Clearly if there were a requirement to take a quality photo for a journal, then the correct piece of equipment would be obtained, but these images that we're seeing aren't intended for that.
You fight wars with the army you have, not the army you want.
In this day and age, practically everyone has a potato in their pocket. Almost noone has a professional video camera with requisite lens assembly costing at least several grand total in their pocket (not that one would fit in there).
Unless you have a way to manually control the focus, I doubt it. Tracking a tiny target like that above a magnet would confuse the auto focus on just about any camera. With manual focus and very steady hands, maybe?
The best results I've had with small things are using the super zoom telephoto lenses like on samsung s22. I haven't seen a smartphone macro lens that takes decent photos of things yet (unless the subject is perfectly still). Perhaps the latest gen has found a way but in smartphone land you're mostly relying on software post processing since they capture so little light.
If just taking pictures, it is doable with an iPhone, but you probably have to fire a series of snaps to get a decent one. I tried taking a picture of a ordinary garden ant at some point, and it came out surprisingly well. That's rather difficult because the little critters refuse to chill still.
Every single thing bought in the lab has to be justified. If there had not been a need to take videos of hovering mm-scale superconducting fragments before, a good videography setup may not be present in the lab. And don’t get me started on what it would take to GET one…
