THE GALAXY S9’S DUAL-APERTURE CAMERA IS GREAT MARKETING
Feb 27, 2018
Samsung’s Galaxy S9 launch event here at Mobile World
Congress 2018 was a weird one. The company went through familiar
motions, but the usual buzz and excitement for its new flagship phone weren’t
really there. Thanks to the toxic mixture of incremental upgrades relative to
the existing Galaxy S8 and the usual pre-announcement cycle of leaks and
revelations, there just wasn’t much to get hyped about. Unless you liked those creepy AR Emoji.
The
one source of solace for hardware geeks came in the form of Samsung’s new
dual-aperture camera system in the S9. Not since 2009’s Nokia N86 has the world seen a phone with
variable aperture, and Samsung’s revival of that feature did stir up some
interest. For me, it was the thing that salvaged the S9’s launch, and the thing
that protected this new device from even sterner critique from fans hoping to
see more aggressive upgrades from Samsung.
So
what is the dual-aperture system and why does it exist in the first place?
The
aperture is the opening through which the camera sensor sees the outside world,
and you typically want that to be as large as possible so as to soak up the
most light. Samsung has moved to the widest aperture on a phone yet, with an
f/1.5 aperture on the S9, but it’s also decided to give users the option to
step down to a narrower f/2.4 as well.
The
answer to why that’s desirable relates to the limitations of having an ultra
wide aperture such as f/1.5. The bigger the opening for light to enter, the
harder it is to keep the entire image looking crisp and sharp. With traditional
DSLR lenses, you often see a drop-off in sharpness from the center to the edge
of the image (and most lenses have their sweet spot of sharpness and light
somewhere just below their max setting). If Samsung’s lens behaves the same
way, it’s likely the f/1.5 setting on the S9 has soft detail around the edges
of the image — an issue I’ve already experienced with the f/1.6 LG V30 and, to
a lesser degree, f/1.7 HTC U11 — and that’s what makes the f/2.4 option useful.
The explanation
from Samsung itself, which I find less convincing, is that the variable
aperture is there to prevent overexposure of really bright scenes. Given the
relatively small size of phone sensors and lenses, and the ability to have very
fast electronic shutter speeds, most bright scenes can be adequately captured
even with a wide aperture setting.
THE S9’S CAMERA DOESN’T RISE
TO THE LEVEL OF THE HTC U11 AND GOOGLE PIXEL 2
In any case, I
did spend some time playing around with the Galaxy S9’s new camera at MWC and I
have a few impressions to share. Firstly, on auto mode, the different aperture
settings are not exposed as an option and the phone automatically switches
between them. In Pro mode, toggling between them is done with a tap. I took
some shots in both states and didn’t find any huge difference in the results,
which is as it should be. Judging pixel-level detail will have to be left for
another day, but from my quick set of samples, I still saw an aggressive amount
of smoothening and sharpening going on in Samsung’s image-processing software,
which I wasn’t a fan of. I can already say with a degree confidence that the
S9’s camera doesn’t rise to the level of the HTC U11 and Google Pixel 2.
My
strongest impression is that Samsung’s probably gaining something on the
imaging front from its new dual-aperture system, but it’s far less substantial
than the marketing advantage of the change. The company can now boast that it
retains a technological edge, it can say that it’s upgraded its camera, even
while the actual results still appear less sterling than the best competition.
I do like that the S9 camera’s autofocus system is now speedier, and my testing
showed no delay when trying to capture an image. But ultimately, for pixel
peepers like myself, this upgrade seems like it’s going to be a little
underwhelming. Samsung looks like it’s going to remain in the good phone camera category when we really wanted it
to rise up and be one of the best again.
But
all that being said, the dual-aperture system sure is impressive as a piece of
mechanical engineering, and everyone at MWC was gawking and admiring it. So
while it’s a neat party trick for the phone’s owner, and a smart marketing move
for Samsung, it might not be the major upgrade that mobile photography
enthusiasts were looking for from Samsung.
TECH
- Apple is creating
medical clinics to offer employees healthcare and test products
- Alexis Ohanian
and Tinder are petitioning Unicode for interracial couple emoji
- Qualcomm’s
Snapdragon 700 series processors offer a compromise between price and
power
- Sprint is
preparing six cities for 5G with Massive MIMO antennas
- Google has received 2.4 million URL removal requests under EU
‘right to be forgotten’ laws
- OneCast brings
Xbox One game streaming to Macs
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