Samsung Galaxy Note 2 review

It's funny to think how a couple of years ago, people were using those flip cameras to capture HD video, yet now you can do it so perfectly with phones like the Samsung Galaxy Note 2.

Again, the Samsung Galaxy Note 2 excels in the video aspect of the camera app. It's accessed simply enough by going into the camera and toggling it on from there.

Once in, you can shoot videos straight away. Not only that, but as we saw with the Samsung Galaxy S3 and the HTC One X before that, simply snap the camera button that appears and you'll be able to take photos during your video without having to stop recording. This is a great feature we could have done with years ago.

Again, you'll find some tweaks that enable you to change how your video looks in terms of colour saturation. These are welcome, because it's a lot harder to apply an effect to a large video after you've filmed it than it is to a photo, due to the rendering process.

There's also the ability to speed up your videos and slow them down, but this has to be applied before you start shooting. We couldn't quite see the point in it ourselves, but we can confirm it does exactly what it should.

Resolutions go from the dizzying heights of 1920 x 1080 to the rather more basic 320 x 240. Obviously, there is a massive difference in size, with a 26 second video coming in at a whopping 53MB in HD. But that's to be expected.

Filming moving objects causes no issues at all, and the sound quality reproduction is fantastic. We had the Samsung Galaxy Note 2 with the Anti-Shake mode enabled as we filmed out of a car window, and found it held its own well.

All in all, smartphone HD video cameras don't come much better than this.

See how the Samsung Galaxy Note 2 fares when put up against the new iPhone 5 in a side-by-side video comparison.