The low-light capability of my N3 camera is my only real gripe with it. I have used my phone cameras as my main cameras for years with no problem. Was in Europe a little over two years ago and the Droid Razr I used then took excellent pictures. I have them on this laptop and when I look at them they look fine. We brought an $800 Nikon with us on that trip too, and really for most uses, the pics from the Nikon aren't that much better where it really matters.
I took thousands of pics with my Note 2 the year I used that - pics were excellent. I have taken thousands of pictures with my Note3 over the last year - pictures are fine. Went to Maui this year and the pics I took with the Note 3 are very good quality. Like I said, my only real complaint was low light is not the greatest quality. That is the one area I hope the N4 really improves upon. I expect the N4 camera to be a good upgrade to the N3 - from preliminary reports it is a very good upgrade. We will know more once the phone is in peoples hands and real world use and examples are shown. In any case, I expect the camera to be one of the best offerings on a smartphone. The Xperia Z3, Lumina and new iphones may be slightly better, but not enough to matter to me.
To be frank, the day light pictures I took with my Galaxy S3 were better than my Note 3, and this phone is only better in low light in that it has a bit better light sensitivity. The S3 was Sharper in Low Light Mode than the N3 is in Smart Stabilization.
The camera was the most surprising "downgrade" on this phone, but it's still more than serviceable in daylight, and it's still baller for video - which is mostly what I do with my phone, anyways.
I'm likely going to wait another month to see what reviews say about the Note 4 before making a purchase, because I don't really "need" a new phone right now. However, I'm leaning towards the iPhone 6+ largely because of the software and the camera experience. Samsung didn't really innovate on that software end much, and really it's way overdue for them to give their customers some of the same conveniences that Apple gives theirs in their software.
I also don't like that it's launching with Android 4.4.4 and I don't think Google will do much for Camera API surface in Android L. On iOS, developers like Ubersense and Coach's Eye are going to be supporting 240 fps recording in their analysis apps (if they aren't already). These apps are doing 30 or less at times on beastly Android flagships (like the Note 3) and downscaling video to 480p becuase the developers don't really have the APIs needed to bring it to feature parity with their iOS versions. I really need something a bit higher quality, now.
It's hard to scrub complicated meneuvers that happen in half a second when you don't have enough frames in the video, and it's hard to see what's happening from far off if the video is getting downscaled to 480 to display on a 1080p resolution display (it kills the sharpness of the video).
If the Note 3 allows recording 1x 720p video @ 120 FPS, then that would fix that issue, but currently they are requiring you to "pre-select" a slowed speed which defeats the purpose of having a 120 FPS video capture (never mind the extra work you have to do if you want to share it at 1x speed, none of Samsung's built-in software currently allows you to adjust the speed of Slow Motion Recordings, unless I missed something). It's a complete productivity killer when you pay a coach for training and you're wasting valuable minutes doing something that should not have to be done on the device.
Google.... Implement some standard Camera Video APIs, please!
