Samsung Galaxy S4 Zoom review
Smart phone cameras have improved
dramatically in just a short few years. Gone are the days of blurry
VGA-quality pics -- some phones now pack megapixel counts higher.
Phone cameras are still limited by size
though. It's not possible to fit pro cameras' massive sensors and
huge lenses into something that slides neatly into your jeans.
Samsung thinks it has the perfect compromise -- a 4.3-inch phone
boasting a 16-megapixel sensor and a 10x optical zoom. The Galaxy S4
Zoom is the only smart phone, in fact, that has an optical zoom.
If you've always wanted a phone with a
good zoom, the S4 Zoom is currently out on its own.The S4 Zoom's fat
body is extremely awkward to use as an everyday phone.
The LED light
Design
Here's an interesting philosophical conundrum: which is the front and which is the back? The front of a camera is where the lens is, but the front of a phone is the screen. It's definitely half and half, but as the S4 Zoom is named after a phone, and you can make calls with it, I'm going to refer to it as a phone, so the screen is the front.From the back then, the S4 Zoom looks like any standard compact digital camera. There's really nothing there that indicates that a phone lurks within. A chunky hand grip is off to one side and the enormous lens barrel sits on the other.
The S4 Zoom as a camera
The S4 Zoom is the only phone -- and 'phone' is stretching the definition -- that packs in an optical, as well as a digital zoom. The focal length starts at 24mm, which is quite a wide angle -- allowing you to capture more of a scene in one picture. It zooms to 10x, which should be more than enough magnification to get a lovely shot .
Behind the epic zoom barrel is a 16-megapixel, backside-illuminated CMOS sensor. It's physically bigger than the sensors you'll find inside normal smart phones -- the S4 included -- although not as big as the one inside an average digital SLR. A larger sensor typically means that more light can hit it, which should greatly improve image quality.
Image quality
With a bigger sensor stuffed inside, you'd be right to expect greatly improved quality over standard phone cameras. While the images were definitely good by most phone standards, I didn't find them to be particularly more sharp or more evenly exposed than the Galaxy S4.The S4 Zoom as a phone
The S4 Zoom is running Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean, almost the most recent version of Google's mobile operating system. The interface is basically the same that you'll find on any of the other phones in the S4 range. There are multiple homescreens to fill up with apps and widgets, while other apps are kept in a separate app list.
It's quite bright, and has satisfyingly
deep black levels and rich colours. It might not have the pixel
density to square up to its bigger brothers, but it will at least
make your photos look lovely and colourful.
There's 8GB of internal storage as
standard, of which 5GB is available for use. That's not going to last
long once you start snapping away at full resolution, so you'll need
to make use of the microSD card slot. You can set all photos and
videos to save to the card and, thanks to a software update from
Samsung, you're able to install some apps to the card too.
