Samsung Galaxy S III 16GB Smartphone Review – AT&T 4G LTE

Samsung Galaxy S III Camera Testing

We all know that cameras have come a long way in recent years, but when we saw the Samsung Galaxy S III was still using an 8 megapixel rear camera we weren’t sure what to expect. The Samsung Galaxy S II also used an 8 megapixel camera, so is this one any better?

We fired up the camera and the user interface is pretty straight forward and familiar. You have the ability to switch between pictures and videos with the slider on the right and you have all your usual buttons for the flash, focus and settings on the left side.

We went into setting and quickly found out that this camera has some amazing little features that are normally not seen on a smartphone. You have six shooting modes to pick from and yes you get ones like burst shot, HDR and Panorama. If you pick burst shot you have the ability to run the ‘Best Photo’ mode, which will select the best shot out of a continuous burst of eight photos. This is a feature that you find on many of the better point-and-shoot cameras! You can change the exposure value, make self-portraits and do all sorts of other things in the settings menu.

When it comes to focus modes there is auto, macro and face detection. All of the modes work well and we quickly fell in love with the 8MP camera.

The 8-megapixel camera
facing out the back takes large 3264 x 2448 images and is said to have a zero-lag shutter. On the Fourth of July we were driving by a supermarket and noticed they had a giant flag and the wind was blowing fairly strong causing it to whip around. We pulled up to a red light, put the window down and snapped this image from about 100 feet away. This image is an unedited crop of the original image and as you can see it looks pretty darn good.

We then ran inside the store and the bright colors of some peppers caught our attention so we snapped this picture on auto. Everything came out crisp and focused. It is almost hard to believe this picture came from a cell phone, but then again this is the Galaxy S III that we are talking about here and it is no regular phone!

LR did a review on the Stem TimeCommand earlier this year and we happened to find it at Target for the same price as it was half a year ago. We snapped a picture of it and noticed that the some of the white objects at the edges of the picture were a little over exposed. The Samsung Galaxy S III camera isn’t perfect, but it does pretty good.

The LED Flash on the Galaxy S III also works well. Anyone that has taken picture of an object with a ton of chrome on it knows how hard that is to photograph. Here is a picture of a Harley taken with the flash on and it didn’t come out half bad. The Galaxy S III camera takes better than average pictures and we found that it did exceptionally well outdoors in well-lit environments and indoors without the flash.