Samsung Galaxy Note10+ review

Video recording

The Samsung Galaxy Note10+ excels in video recording just as it does in still photography. There are plenty of modes to play around with and it even supports HDR10+ recording, as long as you have a proper screen to watch them on - like the Note10+'s, for instance.

Along with all the usual modes, the Note10+ can also shoot Super slow-mo videos in 720p@960fps for 0.4 or 0.8 seconds. There's a normal Slow-mo video recording option maxing out at 1080@480fps.

But when it comes to standard videos, the 2160p videos can go up to 60fps and the same goes for the 1080p video. In 4K, the handset resolves plenty of detail and delivers excellent dynamic range. Colors are punchy as one would expect from a Samsung smartphone and will appeal to most users. Additional sharpening can only be seen in some rare cases when recording small moving objects with the telephoto camera, like leaves, for example. Here are some samples shot with the main camera along with the ultra-wide and the telephoto.

The 1080p video keeps the same rendition characteristics and it's still a flagship quality.

The Live Focus for Video feature sounds great on paper but it's not exactly polished for the most part. The Glitch effect seems to work fine due to its coarse nature. The Color spot effect looks like the best of the bunch with impressive edge detection. The end result is impressive, to say the least. However, the portrait effect is rather underwhelming. More polishing is required - just take a look at the bag and the hat of the subject.

Another peculiarity which we've noticed is that during recording, there's a prominent delay between the action in real-life and the one shown on the viewfinder. It also takes around a second to stop the video after tapping on the shutter. This leads us to believe that there's a lot of processing happening in the background, hence the 1080p limitation of the feature.

Also, keep in mind that these modes work only with people when faces are detected. Once the software picks up a face, it does an excellent job at tracking the subject.

Samsung highlighted the Super Steady video recording in its Note10+ presentation and said that engineers managed to improve the stabilization over the Galaxy S10-series. We've spliced together a comparison video between the Galaxy Note10+ and the S10+. The improvement is rather subtle but the field of view has been expanded a little. However, you will notice at the end of the video that when extreme vertical motion is introduced, the Note10+ produces a choppier video. We suspect that the increase in the field of view of the Super Steady video from the ultra-wide camera (since it uses the ultra wide-angle camera and crops out the excess frame from the sides) has limited the breathing room for the stabilization algorithm.

Another cool feature of the Note10+ is the Zoom-in mic. What it does is honing in on the filmed subject and once you zoom on it, it will also increase the sound coming from that direction. You can see how it works in the video below and we can say it's a pretty successful implementation.

When you are done with the samples above, take a look at how the Note10+ stacks against the competition in our video compare tool.

2160p: Galaxy Note10+ against the Sony Xperia 1 and the Huawei P30 Pro in our Video compare tool

And telephoto video comparison, again in 2160p:

2160p Telephoto: Galaxy Note10+ against the Galaxy S10+ and the Apple iPhone XS Max in our Video compare tool