It works, to say the least… until later that night.
The Samsung Galaxy A07 4G features a “dual” camera setup. However, only one is actually usable—the top one. The bottom camera is supposedly a depth sensor but let’s be honest. The software is doing the heavy lifting when it comes to creating the fancy bokeh effects, not the depth sensor. The primary camera is Samsung’s in-house ISOCELL S5KJN1. Yep, the same series of cameras that the Nothing Phone (4a) uses as its telephoto, so you know it’s quite something.
The front features an 8MP selfie camera that can do up to 1080p@30fps video. It’s a standard selfie camera we’ve come to expect for a phone of this price range
CAMERA INTERFACE:
The default camera comes with an interface you pretty much expect. The bottom carousel houses the modes. By default, this is set to portrait, photo, video, and more. When opening the camera app, it will use the photo mode by default and, unlike our screenshot, actually comes bare bones. It does not have a grid nor a straightener, something you need to enable first in the settings.
Speaking of the settings, tinkering with it can be tricky at first. There is a specific button on the camera interface you need to tap first. Then and only then can you actually go to the camera settings by pressing the gear icon. For a phone this affordable, it has flexible settings options. Some of our favorites include “settings to keep”, the ability to do high efficiency photos (HEIF), and use HEVC format for videos. Though while these two codecs have higher quality, they are not supported by many platforms and apps. Hence why we recommend staying at H.264 for video and turning off HEIF. There is an additional setting to trigger palm gestures but by default it’s greyed out and disabled. We’re not sure why either.
Due to how the shutter button was placed, we sometimes miss it. Thankfully, the app allows for a floating shutter button to fix this small inconvenience. However, once you get used to it, the placement will feel like second nature.
MAIN CAMERA SAMPLES: Works Every Day, Every Hour
We took photos during the day and night. The camera can manually be switched between 12 and 50MP but for this part, we’ll stick with 12MP. The daylight shots of the Galaxy A07 4G are pretty good for a phone of this range. It’s not the most impressive, but for what it is, it’s high quality. You can also observe how much the phone is artificially sharpening the images with its grainy look. Its colors are also not the most impressive, appearing muted than what we expected. Dynamic Range is also average. Your average TikToker or student will be impressed, but an experienced photographer will look elsewhere.
50MP Shots: Massive. Improvement
The Galaxy A07 4G features a 50MP camera, though it uses the 12MP mode as the default. The images are actually binned on a 12.5MP resolution and this image data is multiplied four times to get the 50MP result and theoretically, should improve image quality or make them look sharper.
The main improvement is that text feels sharper on 50MP, the colors are more vibrant, and photos have higher dynamic range. However, at the same time, 50MP shots take a toll on storage. As one 50MP shot takes around 15MB, whereas a 12MP shot takes about a third. It’s not advisable to use 50MP frequently if you’re just taking pictures of grocery items.
NIGHT MODE: A Sharp Increase
The Galaxy A07’s camera takes a noticeable jump in quality when doing night shots. Ironically, its night shot performance is significantly better than expected compared to the daylight shots. How the tables have turned. Normally, for a phone of this price range, it’s reverse. The night shots are worse.
Thanks to improved post-processing, the resulting night shots are much more crystal clear, is vibrant, and feels like something you’d find on a more expensive handset (16K, anyone?). It has surprising results at night. Even still, the night shots suffer the same symptoms as you would find on budget cameras. Namely the softened texture of the images, which the phone overcompensates by sharpening it again drastically.
Night mode takes around 3-4 seconds to shoot. If you use it using your hands, you have to be extra steady or use a tripod. There were many times when fast vehicles pass by the camera and they look blurred due to fast motion.
SELFIES: Natural Beauty
The Galaxy A07 4G is equipped with an 8MP selfie camera and should pose a natural improvement over the A06. We found the selfie camera to be quite good all things considered. Skin tones look natural and the overall color reproduction is well-maintained throughout the subject and background. If you took a shot on a hot Monday morning, say, lunch time, the phone might overexpose the background, making you feel as if you ascended to heaven. Under normal lighting conditions however, it’s more than passable.
Selfie portraits are handled mostly well. It really depends on how many people are there in the background as the phone would rather focus on them than yourself. It’s nothing a “tap-to-focus” won’t fix but it can be annoying how the face detection is inconsistent at times. The blurring effect applied is able to separate the subject (me taking the selfie) and the background surprisingly impressively, with some small errors in the ears or parts of the hair. We don’t recommend using portrait settings higher than or lower than three (simply keep it at that) because at level 4, the blurring effect feels plasticky and overdone, and at level 2, the blurring effect isn’t felt.
PORTRAIT: Better Focus
Speaking of portrait shots, the main camera can also perform it. There are two options. You can use the main portrait mode to take pictures of people or objects and blur the background using software magic, or use “food mode”, which creates a small vignette as your guide to take pictures of food at close-up (2.4cm approx.) range.
The main issue we have with portrait shots, especially objects, is that the phone is having a hard time focusing on the foreground, no matter how close or how far away we point the cameras to. The picture of Anya above, we took several tries before we can make something that is passable because it keeps focusing on our Freiren figurine instead. This either means the A07 4G’s focusing needs work, or it simply sees Frieren as its forever waifu.
When using portrait mode on human subjects, the blurring effect applied is pretty good. The graduation photo above shows a lot of people. it’s quite a busy day, but it was still able to differentiate who’s the subject and what is the background. It’s so good that artifacts are barely visible even when zoomed in. We’re very happy with the portrait shots. So now, every time you want to change your profile picture on Facebook or Instagram, the A07 4G is a reliable tool for those fancy and trendy bokeh shots.
VIDEO: It’s the Same Affair
The Galaxy A07 4G can do 720p@30fps or 1080p@30fps for both the rear and front cameras. And no, these things don’t have OIS nor EIS built in but it’s a sub-7K device and we’re honestly not expecting it. The quality is fine for everyday usage, like taking short videos of a street, or TikTok Dances, but don’t expect anything spectacular. It can also be very shaky if you move around, due to it lacking any stabilization as we mentioned earlier. In terms of audio quality, nothing is of note either. It’s loud and has quite a reach, but also is not very high quality. It lacks good details and sometimes, even sounds muffled.
We aren’t able to test the front video during the day, but above is our sample 1080p@30fps video at night. It’s soft and lacking detail, as expected from a budget 8MP shooter. There are also some compressing artifacts. The daylight video, in theory, should turn out similarly to how it takes photos during the day. And no, the front camera also lacks stabilization, and the zoom is too close for our liking.
Stay tuned for Part 3 where we discuss the performance. Ooh, the phone uses the ol’ reliable Helio G99 which may be old by now, but still is a good chipset for phones at this range.
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