Camera Features

As Samsung's current acme-of-the-line smartphone, the Galaxy S4 comes with a very comprehensive list of features. Our review focuses on the S4'southward camera features and functioning, just allow'southward take a quick wait at the new non-imaging features on the Milky way S4:

  • Airview: This feature uses sensors to permit previews and magnification of sure types of content, but past hovering your finger over the screen. Unfortunately, it just works with Samsung's proprietary apps. This is the same feature that nosotros've seen before on the Milky way Annotation II and 8.0. However, the Note requires the use of a stylus while only your fingers are needed to utilize Airview on the S4.
  • Due south-Vocalism drive: A new set up of voice commands that allows you to command the device when using it as a GPS navigator. You can also send and receive calls and texts easily-complimentary.
  • S Translator is a translation app that supports text-to-oral communication and speech-to-text. For example, yous can type a question in your linguistic communication, and then go the device to speak it to a person in their linguistic communication. Their reply will then be recorded, translated and put out equally text by the phone. You can also accept pictures of written text, such equally restaurant menus or any kind of signs, and then utilize the S Translator application.
  • Samsung Knox was first introduced at the World Mobile Congress in Barcelona and at present appears on a device for the first time. The arrangement basically creates two profiles on your device, for personal and for business organisation use, similar to what nosotros've seen on the new Blackberry 10 devices. This gives your company control over the enterprise element of your device but doesn't give them access to your personal data and settings. The system is based on a security-enhanced version of Android.
  • S Health allows you to monitor your calorie consumption, center rate, blood saccharide level and sleeping patterns with the assist of a range of accessories such as centre charge per unit monitor and the and so-called S-ring wristband.
  • Adapt Display: the S4'south display automatically adapts its effulgence and dissimilarity to the displayed content. The aim is to ensure the best possible viewing experience for text, movies, photos, web-browing, etc., or any other blazon of content you might be viewing on your phone.
  • Air gesture allows you to navigate your device with gestures in front of your screen, without touching it. This is useful if you've simply eaten some greasy fingerfood or painted your nails as you can answer a call just with a wave of your manus. For those of us living in colder regions of the planet, the touch screen as well works when you are wearing gloves.
  • Smart Pause automatically stops video replay if you look away from the screen and resumes when your eyes are dorsum on the video.
  • Smart Curl:When browsing spider web pages yous tin can slightly tilt the device up or down to gyre the pages.

In terms of camera features, the Galaxy S4 comes with a whole bunch of new shooting modes that we are having a closer look at below. Information technology's worth noting that in most all modes other than Auto you loose the ability to control parameters such as exposure compensation or ISO and are relying on the camera's automatic exposure systems. Information technology's also not possible to combine shooting modes; for case, you lot cannot shoot HDRs in Panorama mode. Annoyingly it'due south too not possible to combine the Sports Style (which selects faster shutter speeds than Auto Way) with the outburst shooting part.

Drama manner

This feature has potential for some interesting shots, especially when shooting activity sports or simply playing around. In Drama mode the S4 continuously captures frames over a menstruation of five seconds or so, detects a moving subject in the frame and creates a composite paradigm, combining multiple shots of the moving subject against the groundwork.

It took usa a few attempts to create a usable output prototype as the function struggles with subjects that are too pocket-size or large in the frame or move besides slow or fast. However, when field of study size and speed are within acceptable parameters Drama mode creates practiced quality composites. Y'all can manually select which frames to include after they have been captured which gives you a piffling artistic flexibility, but as you can see in the sample on the correct, including too many frames tin lead to trunk parts disappearing.

The Drama style worked well in our testing, automatically selecting a few well-chosen captures of our moving subject to create a well-timed sequence.

You do have some control over the last image made in Drama mode, but be conscientious of selecting too many of the available choices as overlapping captures of your field of study can result in some digital dismemberment.

Blithe Photo

Animated GIFs have been around on the web for a long time but accept more recently seen a revival and might merely be the trendiest file type in the imaging earth at the moment. These quirky moving pictures merely seem to be growing in popularity, even popping upwardly every bit a new photo booth trend. Samsung is hopping on the bandwagon with the S4, adding a built-in Blithe photo mode.

After you've recorded your viii-2d clip, you lot'll see options to animate or freeze objects. You tin can also trim your recording and change the direction of playback to movement backward, forward or in a back-and-forth loop. Beneath you can see an un-edited GIF. The image size is approximately 800x450 pixels and file size could, depending on the size of the animated areas, exist anywhere between 2 and 30MB which makes them a little large for sharing from your telephone.

Below you can see a sample for which we froze part of the screen. Later on a clip has been captured yous can mark parts of the frame and so select to breathing or freeze them.

After the 8-second clip has been captured moving subjected are detected automatically and you tin mark areas to exist blithe or frozen on the screen.

Here nosotros only wanted the person with the hoola hoop to be moving and therefore have "frozen" the persons further to the right.

The results are non besides impressive. As you can come across below the function but animates the marked areas, but makes no attempt to isolate a moving subject from the background like some third-party apps practice. Information technology's also important to proceed the camera very still, otherwise yous'll come across camera shake in the moving portions of the frame.

Animated Photo fashion is fun to play with but we like Cinemagram, recently launched for Android, better. The app offers more artistic choices for constructing your moving images and a more user-friendly interface. Overall we've seen the best animated GIF results from the Cinemagraph app that is currently simply available for Nokia Lumia Windows Phones.

Eraser

Eraser mode works by snapping a series of images and identifying and removing moving objects from the final composite epitome. After the images accept been captured, moving objects are automatically identified and marked in purple. Yous can so select to hide or show them and relieve the final image.

In our testing this worked quite well for the scenario we see it nearly likely to be practical: when a passerby walks directly in front end of a subject in a busy public setting. How many ruined snapshots taken at tourist hotspots could accept been saved with this feature?

The Eraser feature finds and highlights moving objects in your scene.

The final prototype does a quality job of removing the passerby from the scene, as well as a person moving in the background.

Eraser will likewise identify moving cars and remove them from your scene. And though the paper boxes are besides highlighted hither, the final epitome only removed the moving machine.

A screenshot of the final output epitome — the car is seamlessly removed from the terminal prototype.

Dual Shot

The S4 is the first smartphone that we know of which is capable of recording images from its front- and rear cameras simultaneously. This has resulted in ane of the more than contemporary photo features of the S4: the Dual Shot mode which allows you to capture images with both cameras at the aforementioned time and create a pic-in-picture show effect, with a variety of frames to environment your forepart-facing photographic camera capture.

The default is a stamp frame that creates a postcard outcome when combined with a scenic vista. While this might exist fun for vacation photos, we imagine yous'll detect your kids clamoring to play with this event more than you volition. To admission it, select the Auto mode and then tap the Dual Shot icon, the overlapping epitome of both the front and dorsum of the photographic camera symbol. Tap the arrow at the lesser of the screen to experiment with more borders around the front-facing camera image.

In Dual Shot Mode yous can cull from a range of frames for your forepart-camera image.

Some app makers have been playing around with the dual camera idea before the arrival of the S4: DuoCam and 2sidez create click-to-flip pictures with the front-facing photographic camera capture on one side, the rear-facing camera capture on the other. Dblcam makes a blended image from the two captures. However, none of these apps have pictures simultaneously (simply because that'due south impossible on whatsoever other phone), only capture the images very quickly one afterwards the other. Of course live preview or pic-in-flick video is non possible.

Panorama Style

Panorama modes and apps aren't annihilation new. Nonetheless, what's new on the Galaxy S4 is that the end-results are very large. When shooting in landscape orientation the image is approximately 22,000 pixels wide and one,600 pixels alpine. In comparing, on the S3 panoramas are just 6,000 pixels wide, only about double the width of a standard 4:three frame.

Stitching and exposure are typically fine besides, so if you manage to capture an bonny panorama shot on the Galaxy S4 it could potentially be printed in a very large format. You tin can shoot both in mural or portrait orientation. If y'all don't want or need to capture a full 360-degree panorama, you can press the shutter button any time to stop capture. The app will then create a panorama with the images you lot have recorded so far.

This panorama was shot in landscape orientation and measures 22,096 x1568 pixels.

This was shot in portrait orientation. The end result measures 19,552 ten 2976 pixels.

This 180-degree panorama measures 11,552 x 3008 pixels.

Dark Manner

The Milky way S4 comes with the same Night Mode we've seen on the Galaxy Notation II before. It avoids intrusive racket by blending a quick flare-up of frames into one prototype and averaging out the noise. As with the HDR manner, objects moving through the frame may create foreign artifacts, so the tool works best with static scenes. You should too avoid whatsoever camera milk shake while capturing the outburst.

Notwithstanding, the primary advantage of the Dark Mode is that you can even so attain a decent exposure when the Auto way reaches its limits. For the night scene below Auto manner selects the maximum ISO (one thousand) and the slowest available shutter speed (1/15 sec) but still the scene is underexposed. Past combining various exposures Night Mode can create a brighter epitome and allows you to shoot night scenes similar the ane below manus-held. The camera app can exist figured to automatically switch to Dark Mode when the light conditions get in the most suitable shooting mode.

Car Mode, ISO thou, 1/fifteen sec

Night Way

Rich Tone (HDR)

The Galaxy S4's HDR fashion is very similar to its predecessor's. The camera takes three frames at varying exposures in quick succession and combines them into one "Loftier Dynamic Range" image. Given the express dynamic range of the tiny sensors that are currently being used in smartphones, this characteristic tin be a life saver when shooting high contrast scenes.

There are no parameters to play with when using the HDR way, just luckily Samsung's implementation produces very natural results. As you tin can see in the sample below the HDR epitome shows visibly more particular in the clouds while at the same fourth dimension the shadow areas in the copse have been slightly lifted.

Depending on the scene, the effect can be stronger merely if you cease upwards with an epitome that looks a little also flat information technology's like shooting fish in a barrel to optimize with a level aligning in the image editing application of your choice. You can also fix Rich Tone to relieve both versions of an image, standard and HDR, so you tin pick the version y'all like best.

 Auto mode

 Rich Tone (HDR) mode

All HDR modes struggle with moving subjects or camera milkshake while the exposure serial is existence captured and the Galaxy S4 is no exception. If you don't keep the phone still while shooting you can end up with a shadow effect like in the sample below. That said, normal handheld shooting works totally fine and it appears the S4 does to a degree compensate for subjects moving at a moderate speed, for example a walking person.

Camera shake or moving subjects can result in a ghosting effect in your HDR images.

 100% crop