The Second Samsung Galaxy Camera Is Even More Like a Smartphone
The first Samsung Galaxy Camera was a clever and ambitious hybrid device. It was also pretty awkward. With its huge touchscreen and odd dimensions, it felt like a super-skinny camera or a really chubby phone. But rather than fight the fact that most people these days use smartphones to take pictures, the Galaxy Camera embraced it.
It was a connected camera that celebrated the benefits of using a smartphone to take pictures. It offered Wi-Fi and 4G connectivity, giving you the ability to share photos instantly. It ran Android 4.1, giving you access to Instagram, Dropbox, and any other app you could find on the Google Play Store. It had a big touchscreen at the ready for viewing and editing photos.
Unlike countless other connected cameras, it didn’t half-ass its phone-like features. It wasn’t a camera pretending to be a phone; it was a camera with an actual Android phone grafted onto it. It replicated all the things that phones did well and augmented them with camera specs that no phone could match at the time: an optical stabilization system, a 21X-optical-zoom lens, and manual exposure modes.
Announced today, the Samsung Galaxy Camera 2 doesn’t offer many changes in terms of lens and sensor specs. The second-gen version of the camera still has an optically stabilized 21X-zoom lens (23mm to 483mm, F2.8-F5.9). It still has a 16-megapixel CMOS sensor that’s bigger than a smartphone sensor but on the small side for a standalone camera. Its new features fall squarely on the “smartphone” side of the fence.
For example, the Galaxy Camera 2 gets an upgrade to Android 4.3 from 4.1. Its processor gets a boost too, with a 1.6GHz quad-core CPU and 2GB of RAM. It adds NFC, letting you pair it to mobile devices by touching them to the camera. From there, you can offload images wirelessly.
The new camera’s touchscreen will still offer plenty of room to work with, too. It’s the same 4.8-inch-diagonal size as the display found in the original Galaxy Camera. So it’s still more like a phablet/camera hybrid than a phone/camera hybrid.
When you add everything up, the Galaxy Camera 2’s advantages over a smartphone continue to be its stabilized long-zoom lens and its manual exposure adjustments. Its advantages over any other connected camera are a lot farther-reaching. A larger sensor and a wider maximum aperture would have been nice, but the added horsepower and features have narrowed the gap between this camera and modern smartphones. If standalone cameras have any chance at surviving the smartphone onslaught, they’ll need to follow its lead.