Samsung Galaxy S4 Zoom in-depth camera review

This is a follow-up review of the Samsung Galaxy S4 Zoom, which I already compared with 2 other cameras. In this review, I'll look at the hardware, software and (most importantly) what the camera delivers in real life daily usage.

All of the images in this review are available in their full resolution in this Flickr album.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/kodel/sets/72157636663554624/

Hardware

Most reviews split this out over chapters, but I'll handle everything at once. Besides the camera, this phone is a mid-market device with a lot of technology inside. It has the usual compass, acceleration and position sensors, GPS, Bluetooth and WiFi, but it also features extra's like a light sensor, infrared blaster and NFC. It's also nice to have an SD card slot in case the 8GB of built in memory runs out.
It is, however, slower than higher end phones. This doesn't bother me so much, but I would happily pay €100-200 more if the phone was as fast as my Nexus 4. For everyday usage it is certainly fast enough.
The screen might have a slightly lower resolution than bigger phones, but I really like how vivid colours look on it. Samsung even provided an application that automatically lowers the saturation of your screen when you start the Gallery app, so you will not think your pictures are over-saturated. Nice.
A very positive aspect is the sound quality. I have always felt that very thin phones tend to sound kind of, you know: thin. This telephone gives a rich and powerful sound for which you don't have to position your ear exactly over the speaker.
The battery could be better. I can't make it through a day of heavy smartphone + camera usage on a charge. Given the bullk of the phone, one would expect a larger battery.

Stock Android versus Samsung applications

Like most smartphone manufacturers, Samsung delivers it's phones with a modified version of Android. This is not because their version is better than Google's, but for two reasons. The first reason is that marketeers want something to put in their advertisements. Therefore, each phone comes with bunch of custom applications and a custom user interface shell. The second reason is that device manufacturers receive money from application builders to include applications as a default option on their phone.

There is nothing wrong with this. It also happens with laptops, where manufacturers bundle software (called 'bloatware') with Windows. The difference with smartphones is that you can't erase the extra functionality. There is no easy way to go back from the Samsung email application to the stock Android email software. I find the Samsung application to be less user friendly than the stock application. One example: when I want to view my 'unread mails' it takes me 2 clicks on the standard Android email application and 3 clicks + 1 scroll on the Samsung one. It also doesn't have a spellchecker when the predictive text feature of the Samsung keyboard is deactivated.

There is a solution, however: a young company called Cyanogenmod, originating from the hacker community, provides stock android versions and installation procedures for most phones. My decision to keep using the Galaxy S4 Zoom (or pass it on to my wife)  will be based on the availability of Cyanogenmod for this device.

Camera: quality

I can't stress this enough: this camera is better than anything you've seen from a smartphone. There is a real quality difference between camera phones and compact camera's because of the larger sensor and the better lens. This device has both. Joy! Really. Even for casual family snapshots you'll notice the difference.

Camera: zoom

The 10x zoom is the primary sales argument of this camera. Personally, I don't use a lot of zoom in picture. (I still use ancient analog camera's with prime lenses). But most people will have a blast zooming in. Below is an example of just how much closer you can get without using your feet (24mm-240mm)

Camera: flash

Aha, a real flash! It makes a vast difference for dark indoor shots. The camera makes a good effort to balance the flash light with the environment. Even at the 24mm wide angle the image is quite evenly lit. Pay attention to large bright surfaces close to the lens. In the image below I had to add +1 stop of exposure compensation. Otherwise the image was too dark.

Camera: tripod

Not enough light? With a smartphone this means you're stuck with shaky and noisy high iso images. Not so with the S4 Zoom. You actually have two options: just take the picture and relay on the excellent image stabilisation coupled with the low noise high iso performance thanks to the bigger sensor. Or you can mount the S4 Zoom on a small pocket tripod. The first picture is in auto mode, where the camera chose to keep the diaphragm open (obviously) at f3.1 and applied an ISO setting of 1250 and a shutter speed of 1/6 second. The second picture is with the camera mounted on a tripod combined with a manual exposure of 10 seconds, a closed diaphragm of 8,8 and a noiseless 100 ISO. I like to have options and this camera certainly offer them.

Camera: portraits

So I told you I wouldn't use the zoom. I was wrong. The one thing that smartphones are bad at is portraits. The reason is simple: they all feature a wideangle lens which is good for general snapshots. But for portraits you need a longer focal lens (read: zoom in) to render the proportions of the subject's facial features correctly. The S4 Zoom offers you just that. In the picture below I zoomed in to about 77mm, about the ideal focal length for portraits. Skin tones are rendered naturally, even under halogen or fluorescent light (as far as possible). The white balance is also spot on, even in difficult circumstances like the yellow sweater below.

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Camera: backlighting

Cameras are easily confused when the scene is does not correspond to your typical average 18% gray reflectiveness. This is best seen in images taken where the camera is held in the direction of the light. I was pleased to see that the auto setting dealt with this backlight without a problem. The exposure is just like I would do it manually.

Camera: built in editor

Samsung did provide a fancy built in Photoshop-like piece of software. You can draw over parts of the image to select them and then locally adjust contrast, brightness, etc. I tried it on the image below. The face close to the camera is nicely lit, but the group of photographers on the left is too dark. I tried to lighten them using the built in editor, but it did get a very blocky result. There is no feathering at all applied to the selection. Not useable.

 

Camera: malleability of images with Snapseed

After the fiasco with the Samsung editor I tried another editor. In the spirit of this all-in-one device, I didn't switch to Photoshop but I used Snapseed. This Google-owned editor is simply amazing! It has it's own particular user interface and workflow, but try it and you'll never go back.  I can see myself skipping photoshop for many images using this editor.

Anyway, back to the S4 Zoom: what I want to show you is that the JPG images of this camera have a lot of room to change the appearance of the image in postprocessing. With other cameras you sometimes see JPG artifacts or lack of a continuous tone, especially in the highlights. It would have been better if the S4 Zoom would output RAW images for later postprocessing (like a professional camera), but the JPGs are certainly very usable in Photoshop.

Below is an example of a fragile image that has been postprocessed (to black and white) with Snapseed.

Camera: image format

As you can see in the previous image, I like to crop my images to the 3:2 format. It took me a while before I realised this, but the Galaxy S4 Zoom does have a native sensor of 4:3 at a resolution of 4608x3456. The standard setting however is 16:9, giving you only 12Mpx of the 16Mpx delivered by the sensor. Samsung probably does this to match the image aspect ratio to the screen of the S4 Zoom, but once I found this out I always kept the camera in 4:3 format. It's better to keep your options open and crop afterwards if you want to.

Camera: macro mode

Close-up pictures with this camera are amazing. You don't even need to switch to the macro program. Just make sure you're zoomed out all the way. You can get to within centimeters of your subject. Below is an example of keyboard of my Macbook. I focussed on the letter "G". If you download the full resolution image from Flickr (see above) you will see that every pixel is tack sharp. A great performance.

Camera: Smart modes

I'm not good at Smart modes. I never seem to understand the decisions the camera is trying to make for me. Food mode gives saturated colours, landscape mode pops the blue, etc. I prefer to do these things afterwards in Photoshop. There are however a few modes that are fun. "Best Photo" automatically picks the sharpest image out of a series. "Best Face" allows you to take several pictures of a group of people and to pick for each person on which picture his or her face is the best. The camera will then combine the different faces in 1 picture. "Animated Photo" makes a short videoclip but lets you paint an area that you want to "freeze", so you get a picture with only 1 area in motion. "Eraser" takes multiple images of the same scene and lets you erase subjects that move through the image. Good when you want to photograph the San Marco square seemingly without anyone in the image (but again I would advise Photoshop for this). The results of these intrusive Smart Modes is quite good, but not perfect. If you want to have fun and share with friends, they will be perfect.

Below is an example of a scene that was lit wrong by auto mode. The image was much too dark. It is a typical example where you want to apply exposure compensation to keep the detail in both the sky and the tree. To see how an amateur would cope with the Smart Modes I did what an amateur would do: I switched to landscape mode. The blues and greens are a lot more saturated by this mode, but the sky is not recognised as such and the camera still underexposes. In the second image I exposed manually the way I feel the scene should be metered. I didn't increase the saturation in blue and green yet. I think I will apply a bit of dodging and burning in photoshop first. It is clear to me that the manual mode is still a must. The Smart modes are fun, but not useable for more serious photography.

In comparing the images, I also noticed that the S4 Zoom never closes it's diaphragm in Auto mode. It just stays open and increases the shutter speed, even to unnecessary high values likes 1/800. I don't know why Samsung programmed the camera like this. Closing the aperture above a certain shutter speed (e.g. 1/60) would give much better images.

Camera: video

I don't make a lot of videos, but the one I tried (in low light) turned out good. The sound quality is also good, despite there being a lot of background noise in this performance of "The Cup Song" by my daughter.

Conclusion

This smartphone is a wonderful device and a bit of a missed opportunity at the same time. Wonderful, because it is the only device in the world to give you compact camera photo quality together with a very usable mobile phone. A missed opportunity since this nice product could be so much more with a plain vanilla Android, non-zoom lens but RAW output in return and a decent UI for the manual photography. I imagine it would appeal to Fuji X100s shooters who would happily fork out 1.000$ for such a device.

Now it is still a nice product, since most people are happy with the existing camera in their phone, but it aspires to attract a wide audience. It might be exactly this "happy snapper" implementation that might make it miss it's nice.

I think I will keep the phone, unless we see something like a Nokia 1020 appear in the Android market. If you love photography, the Samsung Galaxy S4 Zoom is made for you!

PS: After writing this review I discovered a dust particle inside the lens. This occurred after carrying the camera in my pocket for only 1 week. It's is very much diffused into unsharpness at the wide setting, but when you zoom in renders images unusable. Check out the effect here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/kodel/10333347925/in/set-72157636663554624  If this issue doesn't cure itself or it reappears it will be a definite dealbreaker to keep the camera after my 4-week trial period.