The Samsung Galaxy Note 4 Review

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.