Motorola Droid X: Thoroughly Reviewed

Video

The X joins a number of smartphones shooting 720P video. It shoots 1280x720 video in MPEG-4 format at a full 30 FPS with AAC audio. This is up from the 24 FPS of the original Motorola Droid as mentioned earlier. Average video bitrate is nearly 1 megabyte/s. As expected, you can force the LED on and shoot video with illumination. 720P video capture is limited to 30 minutes at a time.

The layout of the video interface is virtually identical to the still interface. You can launch camcorder to get directly to shooting video, or just use camera for stills, or either one and switch between.

I found video quality to be almost as good as the iPhone 4’s, which is arguably the current leader. The EVO 4G’s video looks oversaturated and uses a noticeably worse audio codec, AMR narrowband. Though video bitrate is almost the same, I notice more blocking in the EVO 4G’s video than the X’s. I shot the X and EVO videos in the same hand at the exact same time, so feel free to do comparison on your own. Still, it’s hard to deny that the X’s video doesn’t look much more like what you’d expect, and the difference is all software and that SoC difference surprisingly.

Motorola Droid X

HTC EVO 4G

Nexus One

iPhone 4

The X also uses that three microphone array to do a lot of special noise canceling. The result is four different audio “scenes” for the user when in video mode. Everyday captures audio from every microphone, outdoors reduces wind noise, concert is for preventing microphone distortion and capturing loud music videos, narrative is for capturing videos while commenting on the scene, and lastly subject is for capturing video with audio from the front of the camera. I tried all of the audio scenes with the exception of subject, and found that they actually do a decently good job.

I’m impressed with how good of a job the narrative mode did - while shooting the video I couldn’t hear myself talk most of the time and didn’t expect much in the way of results. My test videos are the following:

Droid X - Outdoor Setting

Droid X - Narrative Setting

Droid X - Everyday Setting

Droid X - Concert Setting

Unless I’m mistaken, the X has the most microphones of any smartphone on the market, and I think Motorola has put some interesting use scenarios together with their five different sound scenes. It’s interesting that Motorola bills the X as a camcorder, dedicating a special application tile to camcorder over stills.

But that's not all, there's also video shooting modes that are a bit special, same as there were camera modes for stills. The X provides settings for slow motion and fast motion. When I saw the slow motion setting, I immediately suspected that higher framerate would come at the cost of video resolution. Really there are two reasons for that - pixel binning to gather enough light given a faster (shorter) integration time, and to keep the load on the SoC video encoder block the same.

As you'll see shortly, my suspicions were correct. Slow motion video is shot at 320x240 with no audio. Similarly, fast motion mode seems to reduce sampling but keep the encoded rate the same, similarly there is no audio in the file.

Droid X - Slow Motion Setting

Droid X - Fast Motion Setting

I did encounter one rather catastrophic crash while testing. After changing microphone effect modes, the camera preview went portrait, ditched all of the control interface, and refused to quit. After a minute of mashing the home button, I was able to finally get back to the home screen, but launching the camera again yielded the same thing. This all happened live, right where I was shooting test videos on the corner.

A reboot solved the whole thing, but perhaps this is something Motorola could take a look at fixing.