Very low quality of video

[Vaclav Kovarik]

Quality of photos is acceptable, but video is horrible. Looking like upscaled from 640x480, bad dynamic range, slow focusing, low frame rate. No settings. Unusable.

 

[xerophytenyc]

Bitrate of TG4 video is about 24Mbps, vs the earlier TG2 series which have about 14Mbps. Neither are what I'd consider very good codecs, but the TG4 does have a visible improvement in color and maybe even DR.

I agree resolution is far from real 1080, if I had to guess I would say there's about 650 - 700 lines of resolution. Macroblocking can also be bad especially in a complex scene which happens often, this is waterproof after all so lots of water scenes.

But there isn't a better video option unless you plan to invest into waterproof housing for a better dedicated camera. Perhaps Gopro or something similar may be OK if you don't mind the extreme fisheye.

All these small cameras have small sensors and worse, crappy video algorithms.

 

[BorisK1]

Bitrate of TG4 video is about 24Mbps, vs the earlier TG2 series which have about 14Mbps. Neither are what I'd consider very good codecs, but the TG4 does have a visible improvement in color and maybe even DR.

I agree resolution is far from real 1080, if I had to guess I would say there's about 650 - 700 lines of resolution. Macroblocking can also be bad especially in a complex scene which happens often, this is waterproof after all so lots of water scenes.

But there isn't a better video option unless you plan to invest into waterproof housing for a better dedicated camera. Perhaps Gopro or something similar may be OK if you don't mind the extreme fisheye.

All these small cameras have small sensors and worse, crappy video algorithms.

TG-4 is the best of the bunch as far as the still images go, but for video, I would suggest Panasonic TS-6. That's based on my 6-year-old experience with the TS-1, so take it with a grain of salt. But generally, Panasonic knows how to do video