Galaxy S9 - HEVC grey color shifting / tint issues
13These are clips that were boosted in vibrance & saturation so that we could take a good look at how grey tones are not actually grey, especially when the encoder is using a lot of bits on noisy content. Left is HEVC, right is AVC. First set of clips is at 1080p, second at 1440p. Longer explanation: below.
I noticed that the hardware encoder of the phone has a LOT of trouble accepting that something might just be grey instead of very slightly tinted. It's a bit more obvious on the phone screen itself because the Video Enhancer feature saturates it further.
I find this to be more obvious with HEVC because the incorrect color is tracked "accurately" (most likely thanks to the enhanced compression features of the standard), and in large swathes, big uniform areas, whereas AVC "refreshes" the color much more often and in a much noisier way.
I recommend using 1440p AVC with this phone. And I wish Samsung still offered bitrate choices like they used to a few generations ago. (Remember "superfine", "fine", "normal"?)