What you don't know about Galaxy S7 Camera

Samsung has been known for integrating great camera sensors into their smartphones, particularly in their flagship Galaxy devices. For the first time ever, Samsung’s latest offerings feature a camera sensor with lower resolution than the one on their predecessors, as the Galaxy S7 phones feature a 12-megapixel camera while the Galaxy S6 phones featured a 16-megapixel camera, which was already considered top-notch. Yet, the new camera sensor improves on other important areas, making up for the loss in the resolution department. The Galaxy S7 phones feature the Sony IMX260 sensor, which includes larger pixels to improve the overall quality of the picture and provide better low light performance. The camera on these phones includes a technology called Dual-Pixel, so every pixel in the sensor is used for phase detection, thus resulting in extremely short autofocus times.


Filmmaker Ash Tailor spent some time with the Galaxy S7 and made a film titled “12 Hours in London” to show the camera capabilities of this phone. He explicitly states that “what you can get out of this phone is incredible” and the footage certainly shows some impressive amount of details in many lighting conditions. Let’s remember that the camera on the Galaxy S7 features OIS, and it seems to work quite well, as the images turned out to be crisp and sharp. The video also gets to show off the fast autofocus feature of this camera sensor, as it focuses on distant objects quite smoothly. 

Since the camera software on the Galaxy S7 doesn’t provide many manual controls, Tailor used some third-party apps to control exposure, white balance and focus, taking advantage of the Camera2 API on Android Marshmallow. Still, as an edited video, the quality of the camera on the Galaxy S7 seems to be very remarkable. For regular users, the camera software on this phone brings some nice features such as Motion Panorama and Motion Photo, bringing some movement to those camera modes. Users can also shoot some time-lapse imagery with a special mode called Hyperlapse. The front facing camera also got some software enhancements including Spotlight mode, Selfie Flash and Wide Selfie mode.