Samsung Galaxy S4 Zoom Is A Camera – Smartphone Hybrid
Samsung’s latest offering, the Galaxy S4 Zoom, is a smartphone aimed at users that want a p&s camera inside their smartphone. The Galaxy S4 Zoom is a blend of Android based smartphone and point & shoot camera. It has a 16 MP camera with a 10x optical zoom lens.
The Samsung Galaxy S4 Zoom is unlikely to appeal to the casual smartphone buyer. However options are always good, a niche in a market like the Android market where there are many diverse customers, can be very profitable. Photographers are not only passionate, but also willing to pay money for their hobby, and they represent the niche for which the Samsung Galaxy S4 Zoom is made. Samsung announced this last Galaxy S4 variant yesterday, The Galaxy S4 Zoom follows an impressive list of Galaxy S4 versions that Samsung recently announced: the more affordable and smaller Galaxy S4 Mini and the Galaxy S4 Active smartphone aimed at outdoorsy persons.
It is not the first time the Korean company has made an Android camera; the $550 Samsung Galaxy Camera was an effort in this direction, featuring a 4.8 inch touch screen, a 21x zoom lens and using the Android OS. However, the Samsung Galaxy Camera is not really a smartphone, and while the camera is better than all the cameras included in current generation smartphones, for $550 you would be able to find a better quality camera. Not to mention that
if you want to share your captured videos and photos, you will have to pay a monthly fee.
The Galaxy S4 Zoom on the other hand is not a Android based camera, it is an Android based smartphone – camera hybrid. You can think of the Galaxy S4 Zoom as a Nokia 808 Pureview competitor or even a Nokia EOS (a rumored Windows Phone based smartphone).
The Samsung Galaxy S4 Zoom’s specs are: a 4.3 inch SUper AMOLED display capable of a resolution of 970 x 540 pixels resolution, LTE connectivity, a dual core CPU clocked at 1.5 GHz (but the CPU will vary depending on the market version of the Galaxy S4 Zoom), 8 GB of storage space, upgradeable to 64 GB via a microSD card and a 2,330 mAh battery. The Galaxy S4 Zoom will be running Android 4.2 Jelly Bean and will also come with the usual Samsung software.
Its main selling point, however, is its camera. The Samsung Galaxy S4 Zoom’s camera has many features that you won’t see in many smartphone’s cameras. For example, it has an image stabilization lens with a focal length range of 24 – 240 mm (equivalent to a 35 mm lens). The apertures range from f 3.1 to f 6.3. The sensor is able to shoot at ISO sensitivity from 100 to 3,200. The camera also comes with a flash on its front side and another camera, of 1.9 MP, used for video calls.
The Samsung Galaxy S4 Zoom will be released in the United Kingdom this Summer. However, those that live in the US or in the rest of Europe, won’t be able to buy the Galaxy S4 Zoom until this year’s fourth quarter. Samsung did not offer any information on how the Galaxy S4 Zoom will be priced.
