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In 2012, Samsung announced a device called
Galaxy camera
.Although it looked like a point-and-shoot garden camera with a big zoom lens, it ran the Android operating system and had a built-in cellular connection that lets you use apps and share photos and videos from anywhere, right as you can do with a smartphone. Her motto: "Camera.Reborn."
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The Galaxy camera never caught on. But just over five years later, Samsung announces its new flagship smartphones, the Galaxy S9 and S9+, at the Mobile World Congress Show in Barcelona. The slogan the company has chosen for its launch event – “ The camera.Reimagined.' - is almost the same as the Galaxy Camera once sported. And the fact that the company is talking about a phone as if it were a camera shows that phones have it
will
cameras in every way.
"Camera has consistently been cited as one of the top three reasons people buy phones over the past few years," said Justin Denison, Samsung's senior vice president. why people are buying their phones." I spoke to Denison when I got a preview of the two new Android 8 Oreo phones, which are available for pre-order on Friday and will go on sale on March 16. Storyline. (The S9 costs $720 and the S9+ for $840, prices you'll likely pay in monthly installments.)
[Photo: Samsung]
Similarities abound
While Samsung talks about reinventing the camera, it hasn't radically reconsidered last year's
Galaxy S8 and S8+
.The industrial designs of the new models maintain the distinctive industrial design of their predecessors, with tall, slim, curved displays with an aspect ratio of 18.5:9 - 5.8 inches for the S9, 6.2 inches for the S9+ - and glass black. (Both still feature a headphone jack and microSD memory card slot.) Samsung has further shrunk the bezel ranges, brought the screens even closer to the edges -- and resisted any temptation to bring the immersive feel with one
notch
It also brightened the displays and added Dolby Atmos stereo sound. At least in the Samsung demo, Atmos really delivered audio with a three-dimensional effect not expected from tiny smartphone speakers.
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A real departure from last year's models is a major relief: the rear fingerprint scanner now sits under the camera instead of next to it, which should make it easier for your fingertip to find the sensor without it
smudge the lens
.
Okay, now onto those cameras. The Galaxy S8 and S8+, which were pretty much the same phone in two sizes, had identical (and excellent) rear-facing cameras that weren't much different from those on the 2016 Galaxy S models .The Galaxy S9 still has a shooter on the back.But like Apple
iPhone 8Plus
and
iPhone X
–and Samsung's own
Galaxy Note S8
- The Galaxy S9+ has both a wide-angle and a telephoto camera, so you can take close-up photos of subjects that are further away without losing image quality.
[Photo: Harry McCracken]
Dual-camera setups on big-screen phones are becoming the standard fare. But both the S9 and S9+ get something that's far more intriguing: their wide-angle lenses use dual-aperture technology, which Samsung introduced last year on a clamshell (!) called the W2018 The feature uses an aperture of f/2.4 when there's a lot of light, such as when you're taking pictures outside during the day. But in the kind of murky environments that confuse even the best smartphone cameras, it opens the shutter to an unusual level wide f/1.5, compared to f/1.7 on the Galaxy S8 and f/1.8 on the iPhone 8, 8 Plus, and X. This adjustment — which you can see when you look into the lens — lets in more light and increases the odds , your snap is more likely to be satisfactory than too blurry.
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That's the theory, anyway, and Samsung showed me in a demo - shooting from inside a darkened box - that the extra light actually makes a huge difference. It will be interesting to see how the Galaxy S9 and S9+ perform in dimly lit restaurants and other places where it's still difficult to take smartphone photos worth saving. Samsung has also rolled out other tweaks that should improve overall image quality: That's how both phones take now captures up to 12 still images in quick succession, then combines them into one optimal image. (Last year's Galaxy S models did something similar, but with fewer images.)
Slow-mo photography is another photographic area where the S9 and S9+ aim to sprint forward. (Samsung says slow-mo is the second most popular video capture mode on its phones after the default settings.) The new phones can shoot at 960 frames per second, up from 240 on previous Galaxy models and iPhones. Their software also introduces a feature that makes it easier to capture action that's almost over before you realize it's started, like a confetti-spitting party-favorite popper: pick a range in the viewfinder and the camera will start recording in slow motion mode when it detects motion in that zone.
Then there's AR Emoji, Samsung's answer to the iPhone X
animoji
.Rather than attributing your expressions to a bunny, robot, or other canned character, AR Emoji lets you create a mini-me avatar of yourself.Like an automated variant of
Bitmoji
, the Samsung app captures your face with the front camera and then turns it into a lookalike character that you can customize. It then creates animated GIFs with your digital self expressing stock emotions ("OK", "NO").
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An AR emoji of your humble reporter.
Your AR Emoji can mimic your facial expressions in real time—
AR Emoji Karaoke
, anyone? — but when I tried this feature, the results didn't have the uncanny shine and precision of the Apple version. Perhaps that's at least partly because the new phones don't introduce new front-facing camera features along the lines of the iPhone X
TrueDepth
3D face mapping technology that Apple uses for Animoji as well
facial recognition security
.
Speaking of Face ID, these phones don't offer anything specific. However, they do combine two existing authentication features - iris scanning and facial recognition - into a new security feature that leverages both technologies, depending on which works best in a given environment. On its own, each was chunkier than Face ID, but maybe they work better as a team. If not, you can always use the rear fingerprint scanner in its new, less troublesome location.
[Photo: Samsung]
Bixby Redux
Like last year's Galaxy S models, the Galaxy S9 and S9+ have dedicated buttons for Samsungs
Bixby AI Assistant
.If I
tested the Galaxy S8 and S8+
, the feature, which was only partially implemented at the time, was hardly a reason to choose a Galaxy over any other phone. Samsung has continued to improve it, adding partners like IHeartRadio and Expedia and improving the translation function, so aiming the phone's camera on a sign translates text directly into the image you see. The company says half of US customers with Bixby-enabled phones use the service, and the launch of the S9 and S9+ will be an opportunity to reevaluate it .
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The new version of Samsung's SmartThings app will also come as standard on the S9 and S9+ on the software side. (Almost four years ago, Samsung
Purchased SmartThings
(A platform to make devices in a home talk to each other.) Though there's a SmartThings Hub, the app will need to control smart home devices—range from Samsung refrigerators and ranges to Philips Hue lightbulbs to ring doorbells—to utilize the app's presence on the new phones could be an effective way to introduce the platform to new people, which could encourage even more products to support it.
“We will always be innovating on Samsung products, the half billion Samsung devices that are sold around the world every year,” Denison told me. “These are important to us and we want to make sure we offer the best possible experience for those devices .But SmartThings is the open ecosystem where we can work with any manufacturer or product provider to bring those devices into our ecosystem.”
With the notable exception of the short-lived and troubled ones
Galaxy Note 7
, Samsung's smartphone hardware has been great since at least 2015's Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 Edge. When it comes to software, the company's execution has been much shakier compared to iPhone and Google
Pixel smartphones
.What Samsung is doing with the photography skills is exciting - but it would also be nice to think that the Galaxy S9 and S9+ could go together in ways that their recent predecessors, for all their impressive features, sometimes didn't have.
