[Galaxy Note 4 General] Menneisyys:
As you may have noticed, Microsoft have released version 2 of their absolutely excellent panorama stitcher app, Image Composite Editor (ICE for short) with several new features, including being able to create panoramas out of videos. As I'm a big fan of panoramas and always loved ICE for its speed, accuracy and being free, I've very thoroughly tested the new feature, particularly in order to find out whether it can significantly increase the quality of panoramas one can create with the Samsung Note 4, the, otherwise, best and most versatile high-end phone today.

During my tests, I shot 4K videos in 32-33 seconds for a 360-degree turn (to maximize resolution, in portrait orientation) and, then, processed it with ICE. First, five stitches (three of them with inline crops): four by ICE and one created by the dedicated “Panorama” mode of the stock Camera app:

ISO Auto, stock Camera app:

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ISO 800 (max.), stock Camera app:

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ISO Auto, Snap camera HDR, 48 Mbps, 0 Sharpening:

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ISO 1600 (this has no effect on the end result), Snap camera HDR, 48 Mbps, 0 Sharpening:

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OOC image:

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Please check out my writeup HERE for more info on the intricacies of the above shots – what one wants to pay attention to, how to properly assess noise reduction etc.

Note: as with non-sharpened Snap camera HDR shots, the untrained eye may find the results of Snap camera HDR too soft. After all, as I always recommend, I've shot the video with fully disabled sharpening. After, in the built-in “Preview” app of OS X, some sharpening applied (in Preview, maximal) to the above shot, it becomes far more eye-candy:

My remarks:

1. the 4K + ICE combo produces significantly more detailed panos than the OOC panos shot in the dedicated “Panorama” mode of the stock app, particularly if you're on a Snapdragon 805 CPU-based Note4 and use “Snap camera HDR” at its 48 Mbps, 0-sharpening mode for recording.

2, it extracts far (about an order of magnitude) fewer input images for stitching than the number of separate image slices used by the dedicated “Panorama” mode of the stock app. Basically, in general, it uses some 32-34 images for a 360-degree turn (meaning one image each 12 degrees).

This means that, if there are stitching errors because of the parallax error, they will be more far more severe than with the stock app. Some example of them is annotated in the following crop of the above Snap 1600 shot (original):

With the stock app, thanks to the much higher frequency of sensor sampling, such huge errors aren't at all common.

Nevertheless, Samsung's implementation of isn't as fast as, say, that of Apple. Apple's panorama mode uses an even higher sampling frequency, resulting in parallax errors not being present in the target pano almost at all, assuming shooting the panorama just turning around and not paying attention to trying to rotate the phone around its vertical axis to minimize the parallax errors.

(Note that by restricting the panorama area to 2 some 0.3 seconds in the input video (see THIS screenshot), ICE only used two input frames. As these frames were different from the ones extracted from the video for the 360-degree panorama, the resulting stitched images has different parallax error-induced stitching images – in this case, none. See THIS for the resulting (of course, not very wide) pano.)

3, as with still images, videos created by the stock Note4 Camera app are heavily oversharpened after applying some very serious and, in good light, absolutely unnecessary noise reduction. This means that, if you do have a Snapdragon 805 CPU-based Note4, you'll, as with still shots, want to use Snap camera HDR for shooting 4K video instead. (Note that you must use the configuration settings HERE to make it shoot usable 4K footage.)

All in all,

if you cannot use an iPhone (or, if the smaller sensor and subsequent worse noise performance and lower dynamic range isn't a problem, iPad) for shooting sweep panos, you'll want to prefer shooting 4K video with Snap camera HDR and processing the end results using ICE. It may deliver significantly better-quality results than the Panorama mode of the stock Camera app. Nevertheless, as it doesn't sample the sensor very often, you'll really want to minimize parallax error while shooting. The above panos were shot without trying to do so – I just turned around my axis so that, introducing a lot of parallax errors, I could find out how ICE handles them.