SAMSUNG GALAXY S4 ZOOM

As the Galaxy S4 Zoom is essentially a compact camera with a smartphone mashed onto it, it performs pretty much like a digital compact camera. Its one biggest advantage is that it has 10x optical zoom thanks to its extending lens, which no other smartphone camera today can match.

The S4 Zoom comes with solid glass, which looks sharp from corner to corner, and tested with minimal chromatic aberration but little to no flare. The flash also manages to produce a more natural-looking result than most, and the ISO performance remains decent up to about ISO 400, where you can start seeing slight smudging of fine detail.

We could get decent looking images up to ISO 800, but by ISO 1600 you’ll see visible amounts of noise. That’s really good considering the camera is a smartphone, and its ISO performance only ranks behind the Nokia 1020. Unfortunately, it repeats the same mistake as its predecessor the Galaxy S3, as well as the Nokia 1020; colors can appear overly saturated, losing detail and realism in the process.