ZTE Axon 40 Ultra review

Great potential for video recording, room for improvement

The Axon 40 Ultra's video recording capabilities are a... funny story. And very much a work in progress. Over the course of the review process, we got several software updates, and with two of them, we got significant changes in the video department.

One update fixed an issue where 4K on the main camera would be recorded at 25fps as opposed to the 30fps we're used to and made the 60fps mode a steady 60fps instead of the 58-ish from before. That was good news.

Another one introduced 4K on the telephoto camera, which was previously capped at 1080p60, and you could even record at all three 30fps, 60fps, and 120fps frame rates you can find on the other two cameras. More good news then.

But it was that update that also removed the 8K recording capability. Now, we have 8K clips from the earlier software builds, but we're not sure we should be posting these, given the above experience. We'll keep an eye on the Axon and look out for another update that will bring back 8K capture - we don't doubt it's in the pipeline.

Update, 1 July: Sure enough, another update came in, bringing 8K30 recording to all three cameras - as advertised. Naturally, as with most smarthphone 8K, we're not thrilled with the quality, though we'll admit there's a marginal improvement in resolved detail. It's still not worth the roughly 1GB/minute file size.

Let's have a look at some 4K. Encoded using the default h.264 codec (h.265 is also available), 4K30 gets 50Mbps, 4K60 is treated to 83Mbps, while 4K120 goes all the way to 120-130Mbps, depending on the camera and scene. These are the numbers for the main and ultrawide camera; the telephoto got us 105Mbps for 4K60 and 150Mbps for 4K120.

The main camera's footage, at any of the three frame rates, has this tremor that can be pretty annoying. In attempting to investigate it, we shot with stabilization off from a tripod (as we usually do), then with stabilization on from a tripod, then handheld with stabilization on, and it was still there. It's particularly noticeable in the scene we shoot from the balcony, but is also there in the walk-in-the-park stabilization test scene further down below.

We're cautiously pointing the finger at the optical stabilization bits, which may be jiggling about trying to compensate for shake that isn't there, or not working well in conjunction with the electronic stabilization. We were led to believe in the past that OIS was typically turned off for video recording so as not to interfere with EIS, but it's hard to know what every phone maker is doing at all times.

If you can somehow ignore this, the videos are actually pretty nice. We're getting the same mature color science we saw in stills, dynamic range is good, there's plenty of detail. There's no difference in quality between the three frame rates either, which is great - you can get some nice 4K slow motion then if you slow down 4K120 to a 1/5 or 1/4 speed in post.

The ultrawide doesn't suffer from that issue we pointed out, further solidifying our suspicion that the OIS of the main camera is getting in the way. Global properties here are very similar to what you'd get out of the main camera, which is always great. Pixel-level quality is good too. Again, there's no drop in quality if you opt for one of the high frame rate options.

The telephoto is somewhat shaky itself on the tripod, though in a much less disturbing way and perfectly acceptable given the long focal length and windy conditions we've been getting. Detail is excellent at 1:1, and colors and dynamic range are as good as on the other two cameras.

On the telephoto, the 60fps and 120fps modes come with a bit of a crop - apparently, the phone is using the entire width of the sensor for 30fps, which it then oversamples to 4K, while the high frame rates get a precise 4K crop. That is, the 3840px width from the binned 4624px resolution, not the 3840px from the nominal 9248px - that would be a way more significant crop and a substantial downgrade in quality. There's no such thing - 4K60 and 4K120 from the tele are consistently great as well.

The electronic stabilization works at up to 4K30 on all three cameras. On the main and the ultrawide cameras, it's very good at removing walking shake, and there's no hunting for focus to spoil the footage like we've seen on other phones. Pans don't present any issues either. With this closer subject matter, the main camera's jittery tendencies aren't as pronounced, so this is actually very much usable footage. The ultrawide is properly great.

The telephoto is noticeably shaky when handheld, though not entirely unacceptable.

Our low-light samples are from a firmware that's one version earlier than the latest (maybe two, we lost count at some point), but it's from a time when the frame rate issues were ironed out, so we're assuming it's at least somewhat representative of the final quality. Then again, the tele was still capped at 1080p. So take them with a pinch of salt.

The main camera's footage is on the soft side and is pretty noisy. It's well exposed, though, and it has nice colors, so ultimately not all is lost.

The ultrawide is softer and noisier still, though a more forgiving scene would probably return usable results.

The telephoto, in this 1080p-limited state, shows limited dynamic range coupled with deep dark shadows. Unless you're shooting well-lit subjects, perhaps refrain from zoomed-in video at night.

Here's a glimpse of how the ZTE Axon 40 Ultra compares to rivals in our Video compare tool. Head over there for the complete picture.

ZTE Axon 40 Ultra against the Xiaomi 12 Pro and the Galaxy S22 Ultra in our Video compare tool