Google Originally Stated That the Pixel 4’s Video Recording Option Is Limited to 4K 30FPS as It Allows the Company to Focus More on quality.
According to Mishaal Rahman, he stumbled upon code that shows that Google had enabled 4K 60FPS video shooting on the fourth-generation Pixel smartphones initially. However, the changes were later reverted and the code snippets do not have any comments which can explain this decision regarding the Pixel 4 video recording.
This implies that the phone’s hardware is actually capable of shooting 4K video at 60FPS and this makes us wonder if a future software rollout will enable this feature. However, it could be that this mode was pulled because Google wasn’t satisfied with the video quality or it heated up the phone during the testing phase.
According to Google, the Pixel 4’s video recording is restricted to 4K 30FPS because enabling the 60FPS option would cause nearly half a gigabyte of storage to be used up per minute. Since the phone only comes with a base storage variant of 64GB and can go only as high as 128GB, the internal memory would have been used up pretty quickly with 4K 60FPS footage.
It doesn’t help that the phone doesn’t have a memory card slot and that Google no longer offers free original-quality storage for media. Moreover, the internet giant also thinks most people go for 1080p video recording, so it concentrated its efforts on improving this mode.