I would appreciate it if I could get further input from N900 owners. I know there are other concerns right now (DOA screens, mic issues, etc.) but i'd really like to figure this out before receiving mine.
he video recording of Nokia N900 sounds pretty good on paper. WVGA (848 x 480 pixels) is the second highest resolution among mobile phones we have tested, after the 720p of the Omnia HD. The 24fps framerate also sounded pretty decent.
Unfortunately, the Nokia N900 doesn't actually manage to keep up this framerate, especially in the first several seconds of a video. That results in subjectively quite choppy videos.
The compression applied is also a bit excessive and we would have been happier with a bit more saturated colors.
To put it simply, the Nokia N900 doesn't deliver the performance that one might expect by reading the specs. You can see for yourselves by downloading the sample video below.
Pretty disappointing. Same issues are present that i've noted before. Would these be fixable by the firmware?
Since I've used every Nseries flagship device, I'll say this is a step back, but probably typical of first gen firmware. The N95 8gb and N97 both had similar performance on the initial builds. I hope its fixed in December, because it looks like the framerate is subpar, it drops too many frames when moving around, and there needs to be some image stability feature to help it stop shaking. Video looked noisy, too, even in good light.
All in all, its still better than 90% of what's out there.
I was a bit dissapointed with the video recording, it was one of the main reasons I am purchasing this device. Hopefully theres a third party ap to utilse it better / firmware updates.
This is always one big reason i buy the N900 because of the quality of recording....so i hope they fixed the frame rate issue. I can't understand why they bump it up 30fps. Is it because it's more expensive or what?? If not, i dont' see any reason for not increasing the frame rate because to me, the higher the frame, the better. I don't buy into the argument that 25fps is sufficient for the human eyes.
I shot a video the day I got the N900 out on the street. Busy with cars/people walking around, panned left and right. It was super jumpy, framerate didn't hit 25 once (according the Quicktime player at least). It also seemed a bit grainy.
The biggest problem with the current video recording app is that it doesn't get top priority. Shutting down everything except the video recorder helps. I would recommend going offline, too, so that no apps can be updating in the background.
The phone gets top priority when it is opened. The camera should get this too, but it doesn't.
I think a community app to "renice" the camera app is needed. Something that pushes the camera to the very top of the process pile, ensuring that the recorded video is solid.
