Samsung Galaxy S4 Zoom Misses The Big Picture

The Galaxy S4 Zoom is Samsung's latest attempt to woo mobile photographers, offering a 10x zoom lens and dedicated shutter button.

Samsung turned the heads of camera geeks and tech journalists last week when it announced the Galaxy S4 Zoom, an Android-powered 16MP phone with a 10x optical zoom lens. If you’ve ever tried the digital zoom feature on your smartphone, only to end up with a pixelated mess, then you get this camera’s appeal right away. Indeed, until camera makers finally came to terms with the smartphone’s destruction of the  point-and-shoot camera market, they insisted that a compelling advantage of the compact camera was the ability to zoom the lens.

But while the S4 Zoom would have been a great move in the US market a few years ago (Japanese consumers had access to camera/phone hybrids with optical zooms years ago) this approach represents a critical misunderstanding of what today’s photo-centric consumer really desires from their camera-that’s-always-with-me.

First though, let’s give credit where credit is due. You can look at the S4 Zoom as an unquestioned design success for Samsung if you’re comparing it to their Galaxy Camera. This 21x zoom device, released last year, marries compact camera performance with an Android OS, stripping out the phone functionality. Unfortunately, it is bulkier than a Micro Four Thirds interchangeable lens camera like the Olympus PEN E-PM 2, whose image quality and performance is not too far shy of a DSLR.

In that context, the S4 Zoom is a dramatically slimmed down, full-featured phone/camera hybrid. A zoom ring and physical shutter button that actually’s designed to be used as one, have obvious ergonomic benefits for shooters.

But simply sticking the sculpted front of a conventional compact camera onto the back of a smartphone ignores a crucial reality. If you’re serious enough about your photography to even consider a bulkier device like the S4 Zoom, you’re probably frustrated by the limited dynamic range and poor low light performance of a smartphone as much, if not more, than the inability to zoom.

All else being equal, the way to improve dynamic range, so that more highlight and shadow details are captured, and reduce image noise at high ISO values, is by using a larger sensor with greater light gathering ability. Adding a zoom lens addresses neither of these issues. It simply makes the smartphone more appealing than an entry-level compact camera. And frankly, that’s a battle that’s already been won.

There’s real opportunity in the market for a device that delivers significantlybetter performance than a $300 compact camera but has seamless options for image sharing. Wi-Fi functionality is becoming commonplace on mid-range interchangeable lens cameras, but in most cases the images have to be sent to a smartphone or tablet before you can share them across your social feeds. Pair dynamic range and low light improvements with social media ease in a device roughly the size of the S4 Zoom and you’ve redefined the concept of a smartphone.

And finally, let’s go back to the S4′s headline feature. Is a zoom lens even necessary for photo enthusiasts? Next month, Nokia is set to announce what’s certain to be its second generation ultra-high resolution device with a much larger than typical image sensor. This will be the followup to the Finnish company’s groundbreaking 41MP 808 PureView phone. An image file of the 808′s size and pixel count makes best sense as the starting point for a scene to be cropped to the desired field of view. This can be thought of as a sensor-based zoom. And that’s exactly the notion that Nokia is playing up with the “Zoom. Reinvented” tagline on their recent press invite. With the 808, you effectively got almost a 4x zoom via oversampling technology. Not travelzoom territory perhaps, but this does point a way forward for high quality image zoom that minimizes the trade-off in physical bulk.

The S4 Zoom may be proof that we can have a smartphone that’s every bit as good as a compact camera. What photo enthusiasts are really waiting for, however, is a smartphone that makes the very premise of a compact camera obsolete.