Video capture on the Surface Duo 2: Verdict? Disappointing!

Published by at

'Duo 2 month' continues, it seems. Having already established that the stills imaging on the Surface Duo 2 is pretty impressive, perhaps even inheriting some of the Microsoft/Nokia expertise from the Lumia range, I turn my attention here to video capture, but am disappointed at every turn. From panning to stabilisation to zoom to interface, video capture using the Duo 2's camera (note the singular) is currently profoundly disappointing. See below for results with the December 2021 firmware. Hopefully future updates can improve things significantly.

As usual with embeds, feel free to click through to YouTube for maximum (in this case 1080p) resolution if you want to:

I shot at 1080p, by the way, in order to give the stabilisation more of a chance and to give the digital zoom more headroom. I'll shoot at 4K in future tests, perhaps, depending on what Microsoft changes in the monthly feature updates. There's no reason why the Snapdragon 888 chipset shouldn't produce much better quality and performance here. It's just a matter of extra coding and quality control. Issues like the '2x' zoom control actually producing around 4x digital zoom are rookie programming errors.

Comments welcome. Video capture is merely 'average', though I'd argue that at £1400 or so and with a flagship processor, capture needs to be significantly better than 'average'. What do you think? Can a productivity-centric device be forgiven a disappointing video capture experience?