Is it a digital camera or is it a phone? It’s both!
This was how people described the Samsung Galaxy S4 Zoom – the South Korean giant’s attempt at making a crazy camera-centric smartphone. After all, the phone had a massive 10X optical zoom lens inside, offering incredible zooming features in a smartphone.
With its massive camera bump at the back, the Samsung Galaxy S4 Zoom was more of a point and shoot camera than a phone. In fact, it would be more appropriate to say Samsung slapped a few smartphone-centric features on a point and shoot camera, running on Android Jellybean and called it the S4 Zoom. The phone (oh! I mean the camera) had a dedicated camera button, with a zoom ring that opened up a bunch of camera-centric options with a simple twist. In fact, the phone even allowed you to manually focus with its zoom ring! Now that’s really cool!
Not Your Everyday Smartphone
As for the form factor, the Galaxy S4 Zoom was no less than a point and shoot camera. And it sure puts other smartphones to shame when it comes to its thickness and weight. The phone was 15.4mm at its thickest point and weighed a solid 208 grams. Calling it a bulky smartphone would be an understatement.
Despite its camera-like appearance on the rear, the Galaxy S4 Zoom’s front was like that of a traditional smartphone and not like a camera. It came with a 4.3-inch touch display with a 960 x 540p resolution, a physical home button, two capacitive back and menu buttons, and a selfie camera. In fact, from the screen side of view, you could have easily confused it as the Galaxy S4.
As for the specs, the phone had a 1.5GHz dual-core Exynos processor inside with 1.5GB of RAM, Mali 400 GPU, and 8GB of internal storage. For its battery, it had a capacity of 2330mAh. To remind you, these were flagship-grade specs back in 2013! Clearly, we have come a long way, right?
Enough about Galaxy S4 Zoom’s smartphone features. Let’s see what made this phone so special and one of the craziest launches from Samsung back in its day.
Editor’s Pick: OPPO Reno 10X will support 60X Digital Zoom, even more than Huawei P30 Pro!
It’s All About The Zoom!
The Galaxy S4 Zoom wasn’t an exceptional smartphone but it sure had a powerful camera setup inside. The phone captured stellar low light images with OIS further helping it capture blur-free shots. It came with 25 smart shot modes that ensured you had a unique mode for every situation. In fact, the phone performed really well in smart mode ensuring colors and details came out perfect according to the object in focus.
But what really made the phone special was the zoom set up at the back. It featured a 16MP BSI sensor with 10X Optical Zoom equivalent to 24mm to 240mm! Yes, I said 10X Optical Zoom! Even the camera champions of today, the OPPO Reno Zoom and the Huawei P30 Pro limit optical zoom at 5X. So even now, there’s no phone in the market to beat its 10X Optical Zoom! You could simply take out the phone, point it at a distant object, zoom in and capture a good quality image. This was unlike other smartphones of its time which were practically useless when it came to capturing distant objects. Even in low-light conditions, zooming in wouldn’t wash away the details. In terms of video shooting, the phone could capture smooth 720p videos at 60 fps, one of the few ones capable enough to do this back in its day.
The zoom ring on the S4 Zoom had multiple uses. First, you could open up the camera menu with a simple twist of the ring. The camera menu allowed you to start up the camera, select up to 5 different modes, or you could directly go to the gallery. But the camera ring also had a traditional feature that you usually see on professional cameras. In the expert mode, the camera zoom ring allowed you to manually focus on an object. The experience was similar to a DSLR! The cherry on the cake was the professional Xenon flash along with an autofocus assist light.
The Galaxy S4 Zoom wasn’t really a great smartphone. But it was an original smartphone-camera hybrid of its time!
With the sheer amount of crazy smartphones that we see today, I wonder if Samsung could release such a device in the near future with a better form factor. I mean, wouldn’t it be amazing to have a thinner and lighter Galaxy S4 Zoom with, say like 21X optical zoom (remember the Galaxy Camera?) and that is optimized for apps like Instagram, Snapchat and YouTube Live?
Well, if we do see such a powerful zoom smartphone in the future, I have a tagline suggestion — Moon is boring, let’s take a closer look at Mars!
