Motorola Droid X2 Review - A Droid X with Tegra 2

Camera - Upgraded

Captured image quality is getting better with time, thanks to both improved image signal processing (ISP), software, optics, and of course sensors. Thankfully the X2 brings the entire package of improvements to the table. First off, the most obvious difference is that the mechanical shutter is gone (whose purpose I never quite understood), and the first vertex of the camera seems to have a larger diameter, meaning it has improved light collection over the X. 

The original X was one of the first smartphones we tested with 720p video capture after the iPhone 4 made its debut. At that time, the X captured 720p24 8 Mbps MPEG-4 video with 1 channel 96 Kbps AAC audio. The X2 bumps video capture up to 720p30 H.264 at 12 Mbps with 128 Kbps single channel AAC audio.

Obviously the Tegra 2 SoC inside the Droid X2 could capture at 1080p, but we’d honestly rather see high quality 720p like the X2 shoots over lower bitrate 1080p. Honestly, 1080p still remains a checkbox feature today until bitrates get higher or encoders get better. 

I initially noticed a serious problem with video capture on the X2. Set to capture to the external SD card (by default), video had second long dropouts and stalls, like this. Around 12 and 19 seconds, the fun starts:

On the device itself, capture would correspondingly pause, hang, and even crashed once. I shot two or three videos to confirm to myself that it wasn’t just a fluke, and also closed every application to see if RAM consumption was a problem. After some googling and discovering similar complaints on forums, I stumbled on the problem - set the capture destination to internal storage, and the stuttering goes away. I went and re-captured the video, and boom, no stuttering:

What’s curious about the whole thing is that the card shouldn’t be the problem. I tested the 8 GB class 4 microSD card inside the X2 (which comes preinstalled) in a new USB 3.0 Lexar card reader with CrystalDiskMark and found that it had sequential writes of just over 5 MB/s. Far more than the 1.5 MB/s which would be required for the X2’s 720p video + audio stream. Testing with a 32 GB class 2 resulted in no stuttering, and after a format the supplied microSD card went back to not stuttering. Either way, if you experience problems, switch to internal storage, format the external, or get another microSD card. 

The X2 includes an 8 MP camera with dual LED flash, just like the previous X. However, there’s more to image quality than just MP numbers, which would have you thinking that everything is the same. 

Still image quality on the X2 is improved from the original Droid X. In some ways it’s considerably better, others the same.

White balance in our lighbox test is a bit warm, as are a few outdoors test shots. There’s some chromatic aberration at the extreme angles in the lightbox test as well, evidenced by the red circle around the image. That said overall sharpness seems better. 

What I miss from the Droid X is that camera button, which (as I mention in the video review) Motorola seriously emphasized the first time around as a distinguishing feature for the X. The problem isn't so much that it's gone as it is that the camera software now relies on an awkwardly placed software capture button. What I mean is that the X2 uses the exact same camera UI as the original X, which obviously was tailored around using the shutter button instead of the software shutter button. As a result, more often than not I would press near (but not on) the button and just toggle the OSD instead of taking a photo.