I just read the article "Framing B2B Video" by Jan Ozer in the April 2004 issue of EMedia (pp. 24-30), and I feel compelled to write yon. In the article, Jan declares, "Specifically, at 550Kbps, both Real and Microsoft were noticeably superior to MPEG-4 at 1.5Mbps."
I think fire article could use some clarification: Jan is comparing a "particular" MPEG-4 encoder (Sorenson?) and not the MPEG-4 codec in general. Then there's the factor of your MPEG-4 playback decoder, which can do much in the way of post-processing. You didn't even mention what you were using as your MPE