The Samsung Galaxy Note 4 Review
by Joshua Ho on October 15, 2014 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Samsung
- Android
- Mobile
- Galaxy Note 4
Video Performance
In terms of video, the Galaxy Note 4 mainly benefits from the newer Snapdragon 805/APQ8084 SoC, and the addition of OIS. For the most part, there aren't any new video recording modes on the Note 4, as we see 4K30, 1080p60 and 1080p30 video available to the user.
For 1080p30 recording we see a 17Mbps bit rate with an H.264 high profile encoder. In practice I didn't really see any issues here, although on the exit sign at the end of the video there's noticeable aliasing
In 4K30 recording mode we see a 48Mbps bit rate with the same encoder as the 1080p30 setting. There's a significant increase in visible detail when compared to 1080p, but it seems that this mode is capped at a maximum of five minutes for video length and videos where temporal resolution is more important than spatial resolution will generally see relatively little benefit. EIS/video stabilization is also disabled for 4K recording, so OIS becomes quite critical for even casual video recording in 4K.
In 1080p60 mode we see a 28 Mbps bit rate with the same encode as in 1080p30. I don't really see visible detail degradation in this mode, and temporal resolution is clearly better than any of the other modes. This mode, as with 1080p30 supports EIS/video stabilization although using such a mode will reduce the field of view when compared to video with EIS off. One constant throughout all of these videos is the noticeably jerky nature of the OIS. It's hard for me to tell whether this is the result of an inability to damp certain motions due to the magnitude of the change or the OIS resetting itself during recording, but I suspect that this is a limitation of OIS that would require electronic image stabilization to compensate.
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theduckofdeath - Wednesday, October 15, 2014 - link
I think this is a US centric site and the Exynos variant will probably never be on sale in the US.gunsman - Wednesday, October 15, 2014 - link
Will you guys be getting the international version of this as well? Would love to see performance of A57/A53 compared to the 805. Would also love to see comparison of ARMv7 A57/A53 to (when it comes out) ARMv8 enabled A57/A53 to see benefits of new instruction sets and 64 bitmayankleoboy1 - Wednesday, October 15, 2014 - link
thisMost important think about the Note4 is the Exynos 5433 SOC, which is on the 20nm node. Snapdragon 805 is a known entity.
mpokwsths - Wednesday, October 15, 2014 - link
@JoshHo: You do know that the NAND performance measurements and comparisons between different OS and benchmark programs is not accurate, right? I own a Nexus 5 which, with Android L preview, achieves more than double the performance figures than with Kitkat. That same has been observed with other Android L devices: http://forum.xda-developers.com/nexus-7-2013/gener...I'm saying this because of the misleading graphs you provide, showing the iphones miles ahead of Kitkat android devices. Well, they are NOT. They are just on a different OS / benchmark. Iphones should be removed from the graph ASAP, or include some Android L preview measurements as well. Otherwise, the NAND performance graphs are highly misleading.
JoshHo - Wednesday, October 15, 2014 - link
I don't have any particular reason to suspect Androbench pre-Android L, but I would expect some sort of compatibility issue with Androbench and Android L dev preview.NAND performance is generally not OS-dependent.
mpokwsths - Wednesday, October 15, 2014 - link
OS AND bench programI would expect a great amount of optimizations in the fs layer / kernel i/o scheduler and caching departments, together with newer controller device drivers of Android L. To make things simple: What if the compatibility issue of Androbench is with Kitkat and only with Android L will the true performance numbers show?
We will know soon enough...
Ortanon - Wednesday, October 15, 2014 - link
LOL What are you talking about? The Galaxy Note 4 is a package of hardware and software. Your Nexus 5 has Android L Preview on it; The Galaxy Note 4 does not. It gets the benchmark rating that it gets, and the iPhone gets the rating that it gets.mpokwsths - Wednesday, October 15, 2014 - link
whatever....uhuznaa - Wednesday, October 15, 2014 - link
What's wrong with testing devices with the OS that they're actually delivered with? After all it's the performance you'll see in actual use.KPOM - Wednesday, October 15, 2014 - link
We all know that the first thing the average consumer does is root the phone and install a bootleg version of the OS.