As expected, Samsung is launching its first smartphone to feature four cameras: one on the front, and three on the back.
The Samsung Galaxy A7 is a phone with upper mid-range specs that just happens to be the company’s first phone with a triple camera system… although rumor has it the feature may eventually find its way to Samsung’s premium Galaxy S series in the future.
Samsung is holding an official launch event for the Galaxy A7 in Malaysia on October 11th. There’s no word on the price or global release date for the phone.
The smartphone has a 24MP front-facing camera with an F2.0 aperture, but it’s the rear cameras that are probably the most interesting things on this phone. They include:
- 24MP camera with F1.7 aperture and autofocus
- 8MP wide-angle camera with F2.4 aperture and 120-degree field of view
- 5MP depth camera with F2.2 aperture
Samsung says the depth camera helps you snap shots with adjustable depth effects, including portrait-style photos where the foreground stays in focus while the background is blurred. The wide-angle camera… lets you snap wide-angle photos. And the primary camera supports low-light photography by combining data from four pixels into one pixel in dark environments.
The Galaxy A7 isn’t the first triple-camera phone we’ve seen. Huawei’s P20 Pro has three cameras (a 40MP primary camera, a 20MP mono lens, and an 8MP 3X telephoto lens). The upcoming LG V40 ThinQ is also expected to have a triple camera system on the back and dual cameras on the front. And eventually we may see phones with as many as 9 different rear cameras.
But it’s still unusual enough to be noteworthy… particularly when the first Samsung phone with the feature isn’t necessarily a flagship device.
The Galaxy A7 certainly has decent specs. But it has a lower resolution display and lacks the curved glass screen found on Samsung’s Galaxy S and Galaxy Note devices.
The phone features a 6 inch, 2220 x 1080 pixel Super AMOLED display, an unspecified 2.2 GHz octa-core processor, a 3,300 mAh battery, 802.11ac WiFi, Bluetooth 5.0, 4G LTE Cat.6, a micro USB port, and a fingerprint sensor.
It ships with Android 8.0 and supports NFC, although Samsung says NFC support may vary by country.
The Galaxy A7 will be available in several different configurations:
- 4GB RAM, 64GB storage + microSD card slot (up to 512GB)
- 4GB RAM, 128GB storage
- 6GB RAM, 128GB storage
Pricing hasn’t been announced yet, but Samsung says the phone “will be available in select European and Asian markets” starting this fall, and will expand to other markets “in the near future.”
rear camera system includes a 24MP primary lens, a 5MP depth lens, and an 8MP wide-angle lens that work together to let you adjust depth of field and/or shoot wide-angle photos.
Sigh… this seems like a step backwards for Samsung’s camera philosophy. A wide angle, a MORE wide angle, and a 3rd lens for creating fake depth of field?
When Samsung launched the Note 8, and later, the S9+, they were the only company to truly deliver a multi-camera with (what I believe to be) the ideal combination of camera lenses.
It was a combination of the usual Wide Angle smartphone lens on the primary camera, and a “telephoto” 52mm lens on the secondary camera (a more correct name for this would be a “normal lens”).
Any photographer would agree that is probably the closest we’ve come to a proper smartphone lens selection for photographers. There were a few other companies that threw around words like “telephoto lens” but none of them were bold enough to go as far as 52mm.
If the rumors of this carrying over to the flagship lines are true, I won’t be buying them.
C’mon Samsung, can you maintain a focus on something for longer than 2 product cycles?
So it starts life without the most recent version of Android? Seeing as this is not Samsung’s flagship phone do not expect much in the way of updates.