Samsung Galaxy K Zoom review

Samsung is no stranger to the smartphone-camera hybrid. Admittedly, its previous efforts, the Galaxy Camera and Galaxy S4 Zoom, were arguably more compact camera than phone, but Samsung’s latest hybrid, the Galaxy K Zoom, has very much redressed the balance.

Although the Galaxy K Zoom still has the 1/2.3in sensor and 10x optical zoom lens of the Galaxy S4 Zoom, Samsung’s removed the lower hand grip and given it a smoother, more uniform chassis. This puts it squarely in smartphone territory and it’s not only more comfortable to hold as a handset, but also to use as a camera, as its chunky dimensions and lightly textured rear provide plenty of purchase when using it horizontally.

At first, the Galaxy K Zoom’s hefty 200g weight and 16.6mm thickness may not seem like much of an improvement over its predecessors, but it is when you consider its larger 4.8in Super AMOLED display.

The 1,280×720 resolution screen itself is superb. Since AMOLED panels have individual backlights for each pixel, they typically produce much deeper blacks and more accurate colours, and the K Zoom’s screen was no exception. Our colour calibrator showed it was displaying a full 100 per cent of the sRGB colour gamut, meaning colours were much richer than your average LCD screen. Its near-perfect black level of 0.01cd/m2 is also one of the lowest measurements we’ve seen from an AMOLED device.

Our measured contrast ratio of 23,525:1 was also absurdly high, and there was plenty of detail in our high contrast test images as well as ultra-wide viewing angles. The screen’s peak brightness of 272.97cd/m2 is perhaps a little low compared to other Samsung Galaxy devices we’ve seen, but it’s still bright enough to use outside.

Of course, the main attraction of the Galaxy K Zoom is the 20.7-megapixel camera on the rear of the phone. There are plenty of picture modes to choose from, including old favourites such as Auto, Program, Manual Panorama, HDR, Landscape, Macro, Indoor and Night, but there are also a handful of slightly more obscure ones such as Virtual Tour, Shot & More, Action Freeze, and Pro Suggest.

Virtual Tour takes a series of shots and stitches them together into a video tour of your surroundings, while Shot & More houses the Galaxy K Zoom’s burst mode. Here you can select the best shot or best face, create panning or “drama” shots or erase certain parts of the photo, but we found it didn’t always register a panning shot when we tried moving the camera sideways.

Action Freeze, as its name suggests, is best for capturing fast moving objects because it dramatically increases the Galaxy K Zoom’s shutter speed. When we tried it, objects were much more clearly defined than they were in Auto, for example, where they were a mere ghost of a blur.

^ Action Freeze (above) shows our buffalo perfectly mid-flight, but Auto (below) only captured a vague blur as it was being thrown toward us

Pro Suggest recommends certain modes and effects when you tap the screen to focus or hold the shutter button halfway down. It’s essentially a filter selection tool, but you can only choose from five each time you take a photo.

We stuck with Auto for most of our testing and we were generally pleased with the camera’s picture quality. In our outdoor shots, images were crisp and colours were bright and vibrant, but the level of detail did drop toward the outer edges of each shot. Smaller objects such as people walking down the street below us became increasingly fuzzy and compressed the nearer they were to the edge of the frame and even large buildings in the distance didn’t look quite as defined as shots we took on the Nokia Lumia 930 at the same time.

^ The centre of each image was full of crisp detail…

^ …but objects became increasingly fuzzy toward the outer edges.

Where the K Zoom triumphs, though, is its 10x optical zoom. This is a huge boon over other handsets, as it allows you to frame your shots much more artistically and hone in on smaller details that are further away. The level of detail is also higher on the zoomed in shots we took on the Galaxy K Zoom than the photos we took and cropped to the same size on both the 20-megapixel Lumia 930 and the 40-megapixel Lumia 1020.

For instance, when we zoomed in on some hanging baskets at our local pub, we could see each individual flower and leaf on the Galaxy K Zoom while the Lumia 1020 was a mess of vague circles and colours. Image quality decreased when we zoomed in further using the 20x digital zoom, but there was still a fair level of detail present. It’s easily as good as, if not better than, a typical point and shoot compact camera, which is hugely impressive for a camera on a phone.

^ Using the Galaxy K Zoom’s 10x optical zoom allowed us to hone in on much finer details than other camera phones

^ When we increased the zoom to the full extent of its 20x digital zoom, we were impressed with the level of detail present

Indoor shots showed more evidence of noise, both in the foreground and background, but the K Zoom coped well with a variety of lighting conditions. Zooming in tended to darken our images quite substantially, but well-lit objects that were further away came out much more defined and had more accurate colours.

When we switched to video, the Galaxy K Zoom once again proved itself to be a superior camera phone. It can shoot in Full HD at 60fps, so our test footage was beautifully smooth. It coped well with both slow and fast camera pans, and there was plenty of detail on show at both ends of the zoom lens. Panning was a little jerky when we were fully zoomed in and moving the camera while zooming in and out, but we were still very pleased with its performance.

Once you’ve finished using the camera, you can edit your shots and video files using Samsung’s Studio app. For photos, you can adjust the brightness, contrast, saturation and red and green balance, as well as add filters and decorations and use crop and resize tools. There’s also the option to turn up to six photos into a collage as well as edit photos you took using the Shot & More mode.

^ The Studio app gives you plenty of control over editing your photos

Video editing is more limited, but you can still trim them down (which is useful since the K Zoom automatically starts shooting as soon as you switch to Video mode) and create montage clips of up to 15 videos and photos you’ve taken with the Video Clip Studio. You can set the montages to music, too, but only from the handful of preinstalled instrumental tracks provided with the app. We would have liked more control over which parts of each clip are featured in the montage as well as these are all generated automatically, but it’s still a fun app that gives the K Zoom another edge over other Android camera apps.

Our only slight complaint about the Galaxy K Zoom is the somewhat limited amount of storage available. The phone comes with 8GB of internal storage, of which around 5GB is available to the user, so that doesn’t leave a lot of room for taking lots of photos and videos, especially if you want to put any music files on it as well.

Thankfully, there’s a microSD card slot which can take cards up to 64GB. Inserting a card will automatically switch the camera’s default storage location to your microSD card as well, but you can always use Samsung’s file manager app if you want to move files between the two.

Inside, the Galaxy K Zoom pairs a Samsung hexa-core Exynos 5260 processor, which combines a 1.3GHz quad-core chip and a 1.7GHz dual-core chip, with 2GB of RAM. With so much power at its disposal, this makes the Galaxy K Zoom almost as quick as the Galaxy S5, and the Galaxy K Zoom completed the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark in a lightning fast 486ms when we used its default browser. The Galaxy S5’s score completed the benchmark in 391ms, so you can be sure that the Galaxy K Zoom is one of the fastest phones around.

Unsurprisingly, all this processing power translated into a super-smooth web browsing performance. The Galaxy K Zoom took image-heavy pages such as The Guardian’s home desktop page in its stride and we saw no signs of stuttering whatsoever when we panned around websites.

Graphics performance was also excellent. The Galaxy K Zoom scored maximum points out the standard 3DMark Ice Storm test, scored 6,713 (28.3fps) in the Ice Storm Extreme test and scored 9,100 (38.1fps) in the Ice Storm Unlimited test respectively. This is excellent for a £400 handset, and its score of 30.2fps in Epic Citadel with graphics quality set to Ultra High means that the Galaxy K Zoom is more than capable of handling any app in the Google Play Store.

Such power doesn’t come at the cost of battery life either, as the Galaxy K Zoom lasted 12 hours and 38 minutes in our continuous video playback test with the screen set to half brightness. This is great for such a highly specified handset, and we were also impressed with how long it lasted as a camera during everyday use. We took the Galaxy K Zoom out with us to capture the Hyper Japan convention in London and were taking pictures every few minutes with and without the zoom. After three hours of solid use, the battery was still at 87 per cent, so even trigger-happy photo enthusiasts should get a full day’s use out of the K Zoom on a single charge.

The Samsung Galaxy K Zoom is an excellent phone with an even better camera. It won’t replace a high-end £400 compact camera, as the camera’s default zoomed-out picture quality is roughly on par with most other 20-megapixel smartphone cameras. But for those who want a fantastic optical zoom and the ability to share your photos instantly on social networks, there’s simply no competition.