Image Quality

When it comes to image quality, the camera is a decent performer and matches what most of its competitors have to offer. We tried out the camera both in outdoor daylight and in particular lack of light and there was quite a difference in performance. First of all, here are some of the outdoor shots we took.  We’ve resized these images for web viewing, but you can see the details nevertheless.

Pretty decent quality and the colors as well as details are pretty well captured, but it’s nothing to write home about. We already know about the excellent and long zoom that the camera has, so let’s put that to the test. The following is an image of a mosque that we took below our office.

And here is the same image with the camera fully zoomed in.

That’s actually very impressive for a camera of this size and ended up capturing the ultra-zoomed in image better than we thought. But though there is stabilization, shots aren’t always as stable during the zoom mode and we put that to the test as well. Below are three images at various zoom levels and you can see how the highest zoom is shaky and produces a fair bit of noise which is kind of expected though.

Here’s another image in ample light to show how well details are captured.

Next, we tried a few creative filters. As we’ve already mentioned, Samsung has a lot of them built in and they’re the most interesting and actually creative ones we’ve seen on a camera of this size and don’t essentially try to just mimic Instagram. A couple of examples below.

We then move on to our low light test, and that’s where the camera is kind of mediocre. Images are still captured with ease, but there’s quite a lot of noise for those images which results in a soft detail-lacking picture which gets less impressive when you closely analyse it. It’s not a surprise since low light conditions is something small cameras aren’t known for and they jack up the ISO to compensate for their small sensor, but you can judge the results yourself.

You can see what I’m talking about. But there’s a flash in the camera, which does a much better job in low light and leads to a better picture with much less noise. See the comparison below of two images taken without flash and then with a flash.

The difference is clear.

As far as video goes. it’s an afterthought for the camera and nothing to go in detail about. It records in 720p HD and the image quality is pretty much the same as the quality of the photos, but that means that this low light issue also crops up there and affects the video quality. Also, thanks to the small form factor, the video can end up being a little too shaky at times but that’s nothing exclusive to this camera.