By way of follow-up...
Unfortunately, I don't have the raw video from the previous tests, and I can't retrieve it (at least not easily) from the SD cards because I've repeatedly formatted them since then. But even comparing the raw video using 1.20 to the compressed video using 1.14 shows enough of a quality loss that it makes me wonder if maybe the "High" setting didn't "take," for lack of a better word, when I updated to 1.20. I'm 99 percent certain that I changed it to "High," but there's always that 1 percent possibility that I didn't.
The biggest difference is at the bottom of the raster. Here's the lower right 800 x 450 px of a screenshot taken from the 1.14 footage, followed by a resized version of the full raster of that screenshot for context comparison:
And here are the same using 1.20:
I think the overall shots are sufficiently similar to make them valid for comparison. There was more cloud cover in the second shot, but the shadows are sufficiently similar that I think the comparison is valid.
The file size difference also makes me suspicious. Both cropped JPEGs were saved at 100 percent quality using the same software. The screenshots were taken from the videos using VLC, cropped with Fireworks, and saved at 100 percent quality. Yet the cropped shot created from the 1.14 footage weighs in at 274 KP, versus 178 KB for the same portion taken from the 1.20 footage. That makes me even more suspicious that maybe I had the quality set to "Medium" rather than "High" while using 1.20. It's just too big a files size difference.
The full screenshots were both resized and saved at 80 percent, by the way, because they're just for context comparison. Only the cropped shots were saved at 100 percent quality.
It's also more difficult to read plates using the front camera using 1.20. But because I don't have the raw footage that I took using 1.14, I really can't find shots that I consider similar enough to be valid for comparison. There's always some difference in speed, angle, lighting, which of the many different plates New York issues, and so forth, that complicate the comparison. My immediate plan is to keep 1.14 long enough to get some sufficiently similar shots for comparison to the footage taken with 1.20.
Richard