Video Camera Recording iPhone 6s Plus Compared to iPhone 6: Gone Worse (stabilization)!

We made some in-depth comparisons between these two iPhones and the results were disappointing.

Despite Apple's claim that the iPhone 6s Plus supports optical video stabilization—the "old" iPhone 6 (digital stabilization only) brought better results in extreme situations! The differences are subtle but remarkable. We checked the files on large screens (modern tv sets via Apple TV 4).

The iPhone 6s Plus, however, shows stabilization while recording (in the viewfinder screen), that seems to be the only advantage; the footage itself is worse. That's reason enough to send my iPhone 6s Plus back because I hoped the stabilization would be BETTER than worse.

I'll phone up Apple on this topic next week (maybe it's a software problem and there is an update pending) but I'm pretty sure that I didn't get a faulty iPhone 6s Plus so…

I made around 1,700 video clips in the last year with iPhone 6 and they are pretty good. I can't recommend the iPhone 6s Plus for being better at 1080p60 videos.

 

Personally, I have no use for 4K videos right now (maybe in 1–2 years). I made some tests with the 4K 30 fps setting and there seems to be ONE advantage—if you need only 1080p: The (digital) zoom works up to 3x (approximately) without going blurry (for the price of an immense file size), that's something what the iPhone 6 is not capable. But that's not reason enough for me to keep the iPhone 6s Plus.

Also, the iPhone 6s Plus supports video stabilization on 4K videos (thanks to optical stabilization), I am not sure if the smaller iPhone 6s supports this.

 

From in-depth comparisons on a pro level. To point it out clearly once more: We compared the video camera of the iPhone 6 (without "s"—the old one, the smaller one) with the iPhone 6s Plus (should have the best camera of all iPhones according to Apple). The video stabilization of the old one works clearly better!

 

The iPhone 6 DOES HAVE digital (not optical) video stabilization! You can't see it in the viewfinder, it will be applied on saving the file. It's one of the (widely overseen even by prof reviewers) killer features of the iPhone 6.

Exactly, concerning 1080p60 video stabilization.

 

This short (20 sec) comparison looks utterly crap, I don't know how they did it. No matter what YouTube setting I choose—that example (in the wood) looks really bad. All newer iPhones are capable to make a better video footage believe me. But you're correct, the right part of the image looks clearly better, though.

In our field tests we always held iPhone 6 and iPhone 6s Plus together in the hand(s) (that works pretty good, they almost "stick" together with the original leather covers) and we made the recordings at the same time (simultaneous) with the same settings so we had footages that can be compared very well 1:1. We made intense tests (for almost a week) with approximately 3 hours of footage in several situations (inside, outside, low light, bright light, back light, walking, riding bicycles, cars, buses and streetcars, close-ups with moving camera, automatic/fixed focus/exposure…) and the verdict is what I described above.

I'd really preferred to bring better news to you but that's it. We (professional cinematographers with decades of experience) looked carefully at the results on different screens. The conclusion is that the iPhone 6 makes better 1080p60 videos than the iPhone 6s Plus! The most remarkable difference is the video stabilization, but there were other facts as well (but even more subtle): there is a visible halo around direct light sources (bulbs, sun…) on the 6s Plus, altogether the footage looks a tiny bit "softer". And yes, we cleaned the camera lenses carefully before each recording.

I made an extensive review of the iPhone 6 video camera, sorry, it's German-language but there are some video examples inside (most of them uploaded to YouTube when they didn't support 1080p60, except the last one with the female deer; but you'll see how well the stabilization works, anyway):

Tests der iPhone-6-Videokamera