Samsung Galaxy Camera review

Samsung’s cameras are often highly innovative, but the Samsung Galaxy Camera is by far the most ground-breaking example we’ve seen in a long time. It’s essentially an Android smartphone that’s equipped with a substantial 21x zoom lens and a 16-megapixel 1/2.3in sensor.

It’s well specified as a smartphone, with a 4.8in, 1280×720-pixel LCD, quad-core 1.4GHz processor, 3G, Wi-Fi and GPS. It runs Android 4.1, with full access to the Google Play app store. You can use this camera to check emails, update your Facebook status and listen to Spotify – there’s even a headphone socket. It can’t take calls, though. Perhaps that’s because holding a camera to your ear looks pretty stupid, but it does mean that the Galaxy Camera won’t replace your phone.

Seeing it in the flesh, we were immediately struck by how big it is. With its 4.8in screen, it’s inevitably much larger than most compact cameras that use 3in screens. Meanwhile, the 21x zoom lens means it’s chunkier than any smartphone, at 35mm from lens to screen. Even at its thinnest point it’s still 19mm thick – more than double the Samsung Galaxy S3’s 9mm profile. It’s more than twice as heavy, too, at 300g.

Samsung quotes the battery life as up to 280 hours standby – there’s no stated battery life in shots. That makes sense, though, as this camera is likely to be doing much more than taking photos. The flipside is that the battery will probably run out faster than usual. We managed to take 134 photos and four videos over three days from a single charge, although that was with minimal use of the Wi-Fi and 3G functions. With heavy use it might need daily charging.

As this is an Android device, pressing the power button puts it to sleep rather than turns it off. Waking it and taking a photo is quick at around three seconds. It returns to the last-used app, though, so it took five seconds to wake it and launch the camera app when we had been checking Facebook during our last session.

It doesn’t stay in sleep mode indefinitely. It drops into a Fast Power-on mode after one hour (by default), whereupon it took six seconds to switch on and take a photo. That’s still reasonably quick, but after 24 hours of inactivity the camera fully powers down. It then took 26 seconds to switch on and shoot, which potentially means missing a crucial shot. This rather complex power management is one downside of fusing camera and smartphone technology.

Shot-to-shot performance is a little complex, too. We measured 1.8 seconds between shots, but enabling instant review so we could inspect photos directly after capture increased the time to a lethargic 3.4 seconds. Enabling instant review also meant the camera showed us the first frame of a video after we’d finished recording it.

This wasn’t the only time that the camera app showed a lack of understanding of what photographers want. The autofocus point can be moved simply by touching the screen, but it reverted back to the centre after each shot. Program, priority and manual exposure modes are included, and while the array of concentric wheels for adjusting exposure settings looks pretty, it’s slow to navigate to and cumbersome to use. Exposure compensation really ought to be much quicker to adjust.

The exposure controls are a classic example of form over function

Most people will probably be happy to stick to the Auto mode and scene presets. The latter includes an ingenious Best Face mode – which is also available on the top-end Samsung Galaxy S3. It captures five frames for a group portrait, and then lets you choose the best shot of each person by tapping their face and then selecting from five headshots. The camera then generates a composite shot of your chosen faces.

Other clever touches include a voice control function that follows instructions such as “zoom in”, “zoom out”, “shoot” and “record video”. It’ll even take a photo when you say “cheese”. The bundled Photo Wizard app has a reasonable stab at editing photos. There’s a Video Editor app too, although we found it little unwieldy. There are lots more Android apps available, of course, such as the fantastic Snapseed. It works brilliantly on the 4.8in screen and fast processor, and it’s apps like this that lie at the heart of the Galaxy Camera’s appeal.

The Photo Wizard app is welcome…

…but a much bigger appeal is the ability to install other Android apps such as Snapseed

We also love how the Gallery app automatically imported our photos from Picasa and Facebook. The Gallery app includes a Share button, which sends the selected image or video to another app, but photos aren’t resized before they’re emailed – a big oversight.