N9 Vs. Lumia 800- Video & Audio Recording #MeegoVsWP

Quick heads up- I had planned for this post to be Video + Photos + Camera UI but when I viewed the video samples on my PC and saw the HUGE difference in quality and the Minor rant that this was going to lead to; I though it would be best to split the two.. Anyways.

I took the N9 & L800 for a day out in some nice good’ol sunlight to get some video comparisons and honestly I was shocked at the results- considering the fact that N9 takes WAY better photos and the fact that they both have the same 8MP camera Sensor with a  f/2.22 aperture I was honestly expecting it to be a close fight or even a slight advantage to the N9…

(Excuse the shakiness the first 15 seconds or so as I was focusing on trying to re-adjust my grip on the phones without faceplanting them)- and in case your wondering why I didn’t do that cool split screen thing that everyone seems to be doing it’s because my laptop would probably die before processing it (new 8GB DDR3 Ram/2GB  AMD graphics/ i7 coming in this summer!) and also I have no idea how to do those effect 😀

Take a good look at the Lumia’s Video quality:

Now prepare to be horrifically shocked by what the N9 claims to be HD:

Video Quality:

• The N9s quality was honestly appalling to me; how could they both have the same sensor yet be completely different! This is apparently due to the fact that the N9 records at almost half the bitrate that the Lumia 800 does- which is never a good thing. (14047kbps to 8590kbps)
• The N9 does get an extra point for handling direct sunlight better than the Lumia did (first 3 seconds or so when I was facing the cameras towards me) direct sunlight completely blacked out most of the image on the Lumia; while the N9 maintained a decent amount of quality- although if You do want to some impressive direct sunlight quality check this out (Front Facing Camera on the One X- yes that’s the FRONT Camera: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoYsYzjYdDw )
• The N9 had some serious pixelation issues going on (look at the cars) as well as some horrifying dropped frames (around second :22-dropped before youtube processing or anything)- this is apparently also due to some software limitations as well as an underpowered GPU.
• The Lumia 800 lacks a specific focus box which enables you to choose where you want all the auto-focusing to be going on; although ti did pretty well int he video test above, it does struggle alot when focusing on a subject with a bright light source behind him- although it’s less then ideal conditions this video should give you a good idea of what I mean.
• Color saturation on the Lumia 800 is LOADS better than the N9- just look at the color of the soil- the N9 gives it a grey dead tint; while the Lumia captured something quite close to the actual colors.

• The N9 admittedly had better sound QUALITY although the capture volume itself was lower than what you got out of the Lumia this is mostly due to the fact that the N9 captures audio at almost 3 times the bitrate that the Lumia does (131kbps to 49kbps).
• The Lumias audio capture seems a bit off after the first ten seconds (very poor quality as if it’s coming through a tunnel) this is actually because I accidentally had my hand on the microphone so it messed around with it a bit- true audio recording is probably best judged after the first minute or so.

Since the N9 had a much lower Video bitrate than the Lumia 800 this lead to the file size being much smaller (not really a good thing; if I wanted a small file I would record in VGA); all in all I think the video quality on the N9 is inexcusable; hopefully they can tweak it a bit in the next software update (similar to what the N8 went through).

Category: MeeGo, Nokia, Nseries, Video, Windows Phone