Camera Review: Samsung Galaxy S24 Night Photography Experience

Everyone has been talking about the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra for the past few weeks. As the limelight continued to shine on the flagship model, I took a step back and looked at its younger sibling – the Samsung Galaxy S24.

Samsung Galaxy S24 Series

The base model is often overlooked as the general public often focus on the flagship model due to the FOMO mindset. Besides, the introduction of larger models with higher battery capacity means a longer battery life that caters well to our current generation with heavy smartphone usage.

Nonetheless, the baseline Galaxy S24 still packs a punch as it also comes with the Exynos 2400 SoC that rivals the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. It is basically the same phone as the S24+ except the RAM, battery capacity and display size difference. Hence this phone is perfect for those who are moderate with their phone usage and appreciates compact device.

In this review, I will be focusing on the camera performance as I spent the Chinese New Year while carrying this phone with me.

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The triple camera setup is consists of a 0.6x ultrawide lens, a standard 1x lens and a 3x telephoto lens. From the slideshow above you can clearly see the field of view difference between the three lenses. The 3x telephoto camera stands out from the bunch as the focal length is just perfect for taking close up details of the subject.

Primary Camera

The 50MP sensor on the primary camera is paired with a f/1.8 aperture lens. While it is not the same as the 200MP sensor found on the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra, fret not as it is still a very capable combination. As seen on the sample images above, the low light photo quality straight out-of-camera is simply outstanding. Frankly speaking, the previews are not doing any justice as I am forced to compress the images for web. Otherwise this article will be filled with hundreds megabytes of images.

How modern smartphones capable of producing low noise night shots are through the pixel binning algorithm. The 50MP raw image data is being fed through the phone’s Image Signal Processor and combines 4 pixels data into a single pixel, resulting in a 12MP photo with the resolution of 4000 x 3000. That is more than enough as a majority of the users are uploading the photos to the social media which will compress the photos to save bandwidth and storage.

Ultrawide Camera

As for the ultrawide camera, it has a 12MP sensor with a f/2.2 aperture lens. Obviously it is less impressive than the primary camera as it is a specialized camera. The ultrawide field of view is perfect for landscape shots or group photos. I am very impressed with the low light performance even though the aperture is just f/2.2.

Telephoto Camera

The telephoto camera is simply remarkable. Even though the 3x zoom may not sound a lot but the optical quality is just about right. Since 3x zoom doesn’t rely on the periscope lens technology, the advantage is less hazy image and generally the colour is more vibrant. It is the sweet spot for close up shots or even portraits.

Conclusion

Despite being overshadowed by its bigger brothers, the base Galaxy S24 is still a wonderful device for everyday use. The Samsung Exynos 2400 is a powerhouse that is also capable of highly efficient computing through its ingenious architecture design. Samsung has done the right decision to keep this phone as close as its Plus counterpart. As such, we compact phone lovers are not left out of the high performance experience.