Samsung's Galaxy S4 announcement is making waves all over the Internet.
One of the phone's major upgrades is the new 13-megapixel camera. While a lot
of folks have D-SLRs or nice point-and-shoot cameras at home, only a dedicated
few carry one around at all times. For the rest of the world, the camera in
your phone is the one that you'll always have available to capture random,
unexpected moments.
The jump from 8
to 13 megapixels is a big one, and, like our own Sascha Segan, I am dubious if it will be an improvement. Jamming more pixels onto
an already tiny image sensor is likely to do more harm than good when shooting
in low light—and unless you're outdoors when the sun is up, you are likely in
low light. An image sensor that is physically larger, like the one in the Nokia 808 PureView will do more to improve the quality of
images.
The rest of the
changes in the camera are software related, and some of them sound pretty neat.
There's a Sound Shot mode that lets you record some audio to go along with your
image. You can use this to take a note about the photo, or to simply capture
some ambient noise from your environment to add to the atmosphere. This is
something that will be especially popular at concerts.
The Dual Camera
mode lets you record stills or video with both the front and rear cameras
simultaneously. How you arrange the dual images or video streams is up to
you—split-screen is an option, as is a picture-in-picture type effect. You can
even put a postage stamp or heart-shaped border around the inlaid image.
Drama Shot mode
rattles off a burst of 100 images in 4 seconds—that's 25 frames per second if
you care to do the math. The phone then takes these shots and merges them into
what Samsung is calling a moving collage. It's a single image that shows the
movement of your subject through the frame—it should be popular when capturing
images of your children playing sports or activities like figure skating.
If you're tired
of taking photos and having folks in the background distract you, Eraser is a
feature that you'll appreciate. The small sensor in a phone can't blur the background
like a shot from a D-SLR, and if you're trying to take a photo in front of a
famous landmark there are likely to be passersby distracting from the shot.
Eraser grabs five shots in quick succession and gets rid of objects that aren't
in every frame. Photoshop has been able to do this for some time, but this
should prove to be much easier.
The final new
photo feature is more of an organization tool than anything else. Story Shot is
the antithesis of the iPhone's Photo Stream. Instead of just showing all of
your photos in the order in which they were taken without any sort of
capsulation, Photo Stream organizes your pictures based on the timestamp and
the surrounding environment. This is pretty similar to the Events feature found
in Apple's iPhoto software. This way, the photos from that awesome Justin
Bieber concert won't be mixed up with those from your cousin's Bat Mitzvah.
Galaxy S III
owners may be getting some of these features via a software update.
But Samsung wasn't clear on which ones would come to older phones, only that
features that weren't dependent on hardware would make their way to older
models. If I had to guess, I'd be surprised to see Drama Shot and the Dual
Camera functions on the older phones; they'd likely put too much tax on its older
CPU—but I won't be surprised to see Sound Shot, Story Shot, and Eraser come to
the S III.
[Source]
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