Apple iPhone 6 Plus review: Following the curve

240fps slow-mo in place of 4K

Apple's first phablet brings forth an improved video camera. In addition to capturing FullHD 1080p videos at 30fps the iPhone 6 Plus can also capture fast-motion 1080p videos at 60fps. Slow motion videos have also seen an improvement - alongside the year-old 720p@120fps videos Apple has added even higher-framerate (twice as high, in fact) 720p@240fps videos. That's an impressive feat considering there isn't any loss to resolution.

Sadly UHD (or 4K) video capture isn't featured in the Apple iPhone 6 Plus and has probably been reserved for the iPhone 6s Plus (or whatever Apple will call it). As is the 8MP 4:3 sensor doesn't have enough horizontal resolution for UHD video capture.

Once you enter slow-mo capture mode in the camera app you have an indicator of the frames per second - you can tap to change between 120fps and 240fps. Oddly the video mode in the camera app captures 1080p@30fps by default and you need to go into Settings-General-Photos and Camera and enable 60fps video capture at 1080p. But then the video app captures only in 60fps without giving you the option to choose between fps modes.

Apple has upgraded the already spectacular digital video stabilization we've seen on the iPhone 5s and calls the new one Cinematic Stabilization, promising cancel out even more of the shakiness during video capture. Indeed, our tests showed a noticeable decrease of shakiness and much smoother videos. You can see the stabilization in action on the Apple iPhone 6.

Looking at the field of view of the iPhone 6 Plus and iPhone 6 it's evident that Apple is not tasking the OIS unit to stabilize the video capture, relying instead completely on the digital Cinematic Video Stabilization.

The quality of the FullHD videos captured by the Apple iPhone 6 Plus is great. Everything is sharp and detailed and the exposure was spot on. As you can see the scene at which we shot the video is very challenging with both dark and light parts but the phablet handled it nicely.

Focusing was right on the money in each video we captured and we're happy to say the phone didn't hunt too much for focus. There were no skipped frames at 30fps capture allowing everything to look smooth as it went on.

The 1080p@30fps videos of the Apple iPhone 6 Plus don't shine in either bitrate (around 11Mbps) or audio, at least on paper. Apple seems to dislike stereo sound and has included only mono (as is with every high-end phone the company has released so far) but the audio itself isn't too bad.

The 1080p@60fps videos have a much higher bitrate (27Mbps) but the same audio quality. The double amount of frames per second allows a very smooth video and the loss in detail isn't too perceptible.

Cinematic Video Stabilization on the iPhone 6 Plus acts the same as that on the iPhone 6. Looking at the video below you can clearly see that the optical image stabilization doesn't work during video and the iPhone 6 Plus relies on digital one. Bear in mind that we're slightly overdoing it in the video below just so we check how these two fare in comparison.

Moving onto to slow motion videos - they are by far the most demanding of files coming from the iPhone 6 Plus camcorder. The 120fps videos have around the same bitrate as the 1080p@60fps videos while the 240fps ones have close to twice and will run you quite a bit of memory - some 20s of slow-motion capture at 120fps will cost you 90MB and around 115MB for a 240fps video.

The detail is actually pretty good and the quality of motion reduction is impressive. The videos are fun to watch at the regular 120fps setting and get even better (twice as better) when you go up to 240fps. There isn't a dip in quality when you move from slow to super slow but it isn't too bad.

Looking at 720p clips on a pixel-packed monitor is no great pleasure, even if they are slow motion. But on the 750p display of the iPhone 6 these videos are really fun to watch and edit. The software allows you to select which parts of the clip you want fast and which one part slow.

Here are untouched samples of the 1080p@30fps (0:15s, 30.7MB), 1080p@60fps (0:14s, 45.6MB) files.

And here's our video quality comparison tool. You can choose whichever phone we've tested from our ample database.

Apple iPhone 6 Plus in our video compare tool