The ASUS ZenFone 2 Review
by Brandon Chester on May 26, 2015 8:00 AM ESTVideo Performance
The other side of a phone's camera quality is how it performs when taking video. I've actually noticed an increased number of people taking videos now that the warm weather of summer has returned to Canada. Taking videos is also arguably a more intensive test of camera quality than taking still photos. A device's image signal processor needs to do post-processing in a much shorter time interval, and on devices where OIS is supported there's no way to use it to enable long exposure times as the frame rate of the video needs to be fixed high enough to keep the illusion of motion intact.
The ZenFone 2 has 3 different video settings, although the first one is 480p and not really worth discussing. The other two are the 720p30 and 1080p30 modes. While one may be tempted to just use the highest resolution mode, the caveat with 1080p30 recording is that there's no form of electronic video stabilization. ASUS also has a setting for choosing between quality and performance when recording. I assume that the performance setting is reducing frame drops at the expense of bitrate, but I didn't notice any difference in smoothness between the two modes so I recorded all the test footage using the quality setting.
The first video test is a video taken from a relatively stationary position. This gives an idea of what video quality is like without the effects of hand shake and so the device's ISP is really what will determine whether a device does well or not. I've taking recordings in both the 720p30 mode with digital stablization, and the 1080p30 mode without the EIS.
In this test the 1080p mode is the clear winner. The impact of EIS when recording at 720p is minimal, and the 720p footage is so blurry that it almost looks like upscaled 480p footage. The ZenFone 2 encodes 720p footage at 8Mbps using the H.264 Baseline profile. 1080p footage is encoded at 15Mbps and also uses H.264 Baseline. Unfortunately, even the 1080p footage isn't very impressive. There's just a general lack of sharpness throughout the entire frame.
The next test makes things more interesting by adding a significant amount of camera movement. This is where the use of EIS in the 720p mode will come into play, while the 1080p mode will most certainly have a higher degree of shakiness.
In this test it's clear that the 720p is much more stable than the 1080p footage overall. However, there are numerous instances where the the camera moves too far from its original position and the video drops frames as it settles on a new position. There's also a significant amount of high frequency shaking which makes the entire video look like it's wobbling back and forth very quickly. Both of these issues are very similar to what you see with video that is stablized using OIS, which is strange because the ZenFone 2's camera doesn't have OIS.
Unfortunately, the 720p video is again very blurry. The 1080p video is better, but is also not near as good as the output from other smartphones. It doesn't appear that there's any degree of EIS being used to stabilize the 1080p footage either. Both modes suffer from some noticeable processing issues, including halos where branches of trees are in front of the sky.
At this point it's becoming fairly evident to me that the ISP is being used in the ZenFone 2 is very far behind the competition. It would be nice if ISPs in mobile were less opaque so we had a better idea of what goes on at that stage in the pipeline. Whatever the cause may be, the ZenFone 2's video output is fairly uninspiring. If you do need to take a video with it I would still use the 1080p mode despite the shakiness, as the 720p mode is just far too blurry.
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re2onance - Friday, May 29, 2015 - link
nm, apparently that isn't correctmeacupla - Tuesday, May 26, 2015 - link
ok, done deal for a protective case for this thing then.blzd - Thursday, May 28, 2015 - link
That's one of the issues with larger phones such as this.jjj - Tuesday, May 26, 2015 - link
Actually in many markets the top Zenfone does compete with the G3 , S5 and the likes on price. Asus isn't quite hitting the 300$ + tax price everywhere and older flagships do get cheaper. The currency drops in some markets are not helping them either. The 200$ model is better value but it competes with A53 based devices that can be plenty cheaper with similar specs In China the TLC Meme da 3S ( 5inch 1080p , SD615 , 2GB RAM , 16GB NAND , 13MP and 8MP cams ,3050mAh ,139.6x69.6x8.9mm ,130g) just launched at 799CNY and that's 129$. Differences aside, they do have to compete with such devices. For the 300$ device you also got the soon to arrive SoCs, spending 300$ on this now might feel like a mistake in a few months.Wish you had the 1.8GHz 4GB RAM and 2GB RAM versions (they do have a lower clocked 4GB version) to compare battery life. In browsing the 4GB of RAM might be what kills it so fast.
Always wanted to ask about the LTE battery test , how much of the time time is idle or each of the LTE power states. Or maybe even better, how much data is used per minute or hour or w/e. Americans can afford to use a few GB per month but most of the world uses 10 times less or worse. In any case, the daily average usage is from almost 0 to bellow 200MB so LTE is most of the time idle if not disabled. Knowing how much data you use in testing battery life would help understand the relevance of the test and maybe help you better calibrate it in the future. So any chance you can provide some (rough) estimate on data usage when doing that test? Right now we have no idea if it's 60MB per hour or 10 times less and that's a huge range.
menting - Tuesday, May 26, 2015 - link
Frankly, I don't think the difference in 4GB RAM and 2GB RAM should make that much of a difference. A difference of doubling the refresh rate in the DRAM, as well as the difference in idle power should be peanuts compared to to what the other components are pulling.Glock24 - Tuesday, May 26, 2015 - link
I'm also interested in knowing if there's any difference in battery life between the 1.8GHz 2GB and 2.33GHz 4GB version.Some people in forums are saying the 4GB version drains the battery faster, some say the high battery drain was due to some bug in Lollipop. Maybe this was already addressed in a system update? All those comments about poor battery life of the 4GB phone come from people using the TW or India version with factory software version (which I assume is older than that on the US version). But still, would be interesting to know for sure if the 2GB version has better battery life.
I've read some people complain about the phone overheating, but there's no mention about temperatures in the review. Does it get hot during heavy use? Does it become so hot it's not comfortable to hold?
In the review Brandon talks about preinstalled bloatware, but does not mention about any useful bundled software. For example, I've read in other reviews about a bundled app that gives the user granular control over which applications run in the background and which ones are allowed to autostart, without the need for the phone to be rooted.
Also Asus gives you 5GB storage in Asus's own service with each device. How well or bad does the Asus Cloud app work? Does it make automatic backups? Is it easy to setup or use?
Chinaphonearena - Tuesday, May 26, 2015 - link
An outstanding review, man. Truly. I hope you don't mind me plugging my own of the 2gb/16gb/1080p model. It's not nearly as technical or thorough as this, but some may get something out of it.http://www.gizbeat.com/7449/asus-zenfone-2-full-re...
Also the tear down of the phone from a Taiwanese user, which shows some of the components Asus is using.
http://www.gizbeat.com/7622/take-a-look-inside-the...
ketacdx - Tuesday, May 26, 2015 - link
I have a TW 4GB model and its been getting 2 software updates a month fixing little things here and there on top of the ZenUI updates. I have not had any overheating or even it getting warm. My Nexus 5 from before this got way more hot. There is an Auto-start manager which is kind of neat but 80% of the preinstalled stuff is useless. Luckily most of it can be uninstalled and not just disabled which is cool. I don't know about the US model but the TW model gives me 100 GB's of free Google Drive storage for 2 years. I am in Canada and it enabled fine. I have never used to Asus cloud so I don't know how much they provide.Manch - Tuesday, May 26, 2015 - link
I'd like to see Windows Mobile loaded onto this and the benchmarks run again. Is that possible? MS said they would release a ROM that could be installed over android.Gich - Tuesday, May 26, 2015 - link
I think they made only a ROM for Xiaomi Mi4...