Videos coming out very soft and detail-less...

[jayochs]

OK 'man', let's try this again. First off, much of what you say IS opinion and NOT fact. So please don't tell us that everything you say is 'fact'. It's simply not. Not all of us have this 'underwater' audio you complain about. There are plenty of G2 videos you can find on the net that show this too. You don't want to accept that, that's fine. But please don't insist we all have it, we don't.

Secondly, as I stated before, I think the G2's video is competitive with all the high-end phones I've seen. I haven't seen the 47 megapixel Lumia yet, so I'll refrain from judging that one. As far as the S4's video being better, that's your opinion. I owned it and I disagree. I do video for a living and I think I can recognize good, bad and indifferent videos. I have yet to see a cellphone camera exhibit good autofocus. They all leave much to be desired. My S4's video had a wonkiness too in its autofocus just like the G2. I find the G2's detail better than the S4's, but I find the S4's exposure for video better than the G2. Where I DO agree with you is I would love to be able to manually focus the video or at least do a manual 'touch' focus as in the S4.

I totally disagree with you about the 'smoothness' of the video. Both the S4 and the G2 suffer from a stuttering that may be due to the frame rate, dropped frames or something else. But I most certainly saw the same effect in the S4. Once again, it's the reason that the 'video sections' of these camera all leave much to be desired. Of course if you watch these videos on the right display device you can minimize the stuttering. I watch on a Samsung F8500 plasma and can essentially double the frame rate to smooth out the video. Does it have the smoothness of a dedicated camcorder? Of course not, it's a cellphone video and the S4 is every bit as 'guilty' in this respect.

None of these are perfect and all have their pluses and minues. You are simply in a mode where nothing is right with the camera of the G2.

guess i'll have to upload videos proving that the G2 only locks 15fps when set to 30fps mode, even in high indoor lighting, and the S4 is a constant 29. you say you work doing video for a living, but if you can't see issues with framerate drops in anything other than using the sun as your lightsource, then i have no idea what version of the G2 you're using.

as for the "underwater" sound, yes, every phone has it. you may sit there and claim it doesn't, but it's a SOFTWARE issue. the noise cancelling mic creates this wishwash sound when hitting a certain db level, and the mic gain is set way too high on this phone. bc of this, anything relatively high gain will max it out, and it'll try to compensate with it's noise cancellation, and this results in pure failure of the microphone. frequencies change, and the audio becomes simply awful. it will happen on ANY g2, because this isn't a specific case. the videos you're seeing online are of people walking around their damn yards and down the street showing 30 second clips of the thing on youtube; of course there isn't any artifacting in the audio, because they aren't even coming close to hitting high gain.

 

[Ken7]

Once again, there are many many G2 videos that show no audio 'underwater' effect. You saying the opposite won't change that. You uploading yours won't change that either. It might show yours is prone to that, but it surely won't change the many videos I've seen where the effect is not present.

As for frame rate drops in indoor lighting, yes they do happen. It's done as a means of brightening the video. It is what it is. As I said before, you can try dropping the exposure on the video section and see if that helps. I prefer almost all the G2's videos to be dialed in at -1 since I find it tends to overexpose. Of course I've had many dedicated camcorders that do the same thing and it's pretty routine for me to drop the default exposure down by one stop or so.

Bottom line is we have two different opinions here. For me the bottom line is that I don't take cellphone camcorder sections too seriously. They're cellphones. The S3 I still have is decent for a cellphone and the S4 was also decent. But 'decent' is used within the realm of cellphone videos. If I were to judge any cellphone's video on an absolute basis, I would tell you they're all pretty poor.

Honestly, I'm tired of arguing this subject. If you don't like the G2's video section, don't use it. If I felt like you did I sure wouldn't. Hell, I don't even feel like you do and I probably still won't use the video end of it. I never do with any of my cellphones. I tend to play with them at the beginning and then wind up never using them. Why? Because they all stink...especially when you're used to watching high quality videos from a dedicated camcorder. I would never make my choice of a cellphone based on the quality of the camcorder section. OTOH, the still pictures taken by the G2 are excellent. Even judging on an absolute basis, I think the results are very good and wouldn't hesitate using it.