Gadgetory

isn't it frustrating when you're watching a phone review and when the reviewer gets to the cameras action all they poster a couple of mediocre shots while writing the phone off because it's not one of their favorite iPhones or galaxies don't you want to know more about a phone camera than what you might learn from a handful of lame HDR shots let's do something about this we live in an age where the only camera a person might own is the one bolted to the back of their phone so shouldn't we review that with the same attention we might give a standalone camera there's more to smartphone photography than just megapixels and selfies shooting in real-world conditions we're going to cover color saturation exposure optics image stabilization bulk a low-light focusing video and any other fun features the manufacturer might have packed on I'm Juan Carlos bag now for pocket now and here's our real camera review of the Asus zenfone zoom buckle up folks we've got a lot of ground to cover and I'm gonna move pretty quick first of all a little housekeeping the zenfone zoom is utilizing a 1/3 inch 13 megapixel image sensor with a native 4 by 3 aspect ratio this is similar to what you might find in the iPhone 6s and is smaller than what you'll find in phones like the LG v10 note 5 in lumia 950 this lens has an aperture of f28 at the wide end which closes down to f/4 point 8 at full zoom to fill this video frame we're also shooting in 10 megapixel mode which essentially cuts off the top and bottom to create a 16 by 9 aspect ratio video quality maxes out at 1080p at 30 frames per second but there is a slow motion setting and we'll talk about that more in a bit starting with exposure and saturation during bright daylight conditions the zoom is fairly well restrained I think most phones tend to overexpose off and around two-thirds of a stop to a full stop the a sous camera app is trying to produce punchy bright colors but I found I was rarely adjusting more than around a third of a stop to rain in highlights any adjustments made to photos or videos will be noted in the upper left hand corner by the way blues greens and browns are usually pretty easy for our cameras to expose for the zenfone performed well in capturing those colors though the image processing would occasionally exaggerate the sky especially when the frame was predominantly green which resulted in the cyan stripe near the horizon white objects are the hardest to expose for and I did need to drop the exposure a full-stop to retain petal detail here it makes the overall shot too dark but that's what it took to prevent clipping in the highlights yellows were fantastically captured warmer colors like yellow and red in direct sunlight are very challenging to expose for without clipping and the zoom performed very well here Reds also fared well they're starting to sizzle but the camera is preventing these from clipping fine details and morphing this color into an aggravated magenta its juicy to be sure but we do have HTC style controls to adjust output like contrast and saturation it's easy to dial this color pop back a bit if we need to and as you can also increase saturation here we can show you that too much color means losing detail and that's what we mean by clipping we've set the photo quality defined for all of these shots but the average JPEG size was between 2 and 4 megabytes I think we are seeing a subtle loss of detail when zooming in thanks to that compression there is no raw setting that I could find on the zoom so no luck in shooting a larger photo which you can edit on your own through Lightroom or Snapseed looking at the lens it's a bit on the dull side it's absolutely fine and preserving details across medium distances or landscapes happily we only see trace amounts of color fringing at the borders of high contrast areas this subtle hazy green color which pops up on the edges of these flowers this lends dullness though is most noticeable at macro distances which I'm particularly sensitive to as close-up photos are my favorite things to shoot when you do nail the focus up close you get pleasant shots but it's easy to see software artifacting and sharpening with even a subtle crop that this camera has a smaller sensor and smaller aperture means it's not going to be a depth of field champ at minimum focusing distances objects yards behind your subject will still be easily identifiable the zoom won't help you here as much as it extends the minimum distance you can focus from your subject and shrinks the aperture which just kind of balances out the amount of background blur you might be able to create lots of cameras have difficulty focusing on tiny details close up to the lens and the ASIS is no exception focusing system here is really twitchy after you log focus you have about a second to take the pic before it resets unless you long press the focus area to lock that focus point in place it's a fast performer but even with laser assist it still doesn't have the same sure-footed feel that a phone like the LG g4 has it jumps in pulses instead of rolling and locking it's also a pet peeve of mine when there's not better error reporting another common sin is to report a focus lock even though I haven't actually properly focused on the area I tapped on now I tapped here but the phone actually locked here because I was too close but I still got a green circle telling me it had a lock here the ASIS will report when you're too close so it does a better job than most but I had a handful of shots like this where it just missed with no warning minimum focusing distance is above-average getting your subject within two inches of the lens when shooting fully wide but when zoomed out the closest you'll be able to get is just under 12 inches looking at white balance performance for the most part this camera gets it right though shadowed shots will often view a bit cooler and bluer than I would like it doesn't approach the icy look we sometimes get from the iPhone but thankfully we can adjust the white balance here pretty quickly those manual controls are fantastic another gripe I have with most Android cameras is how they process HDR photos high dynamic range means we should see more details in darker and brighter areas of our frame but more often than not Android HDR just becomes a shadow brightening mode we don't see bright sections improved this is precisely what happens with da soos we pop extra detail in the shadows but highlights either stay the same or get brighter which gets worse as we have a full suite of manual controls I think you're more likely to land the shot you want with a quick exposure adjustment rather than by firing up the HDR mode panorama performance is fluid and stitching is terrific a soos is using the same kind of pan and scan setup as phones like the iPhone 6s or galaxy s6 the zoom did a terrific job and stitching together fine elements throughout the frame like these power lines on landscapes weekend saw that odd inconsistency in color where one pass we got a perfectly natural looking panorama shot on his second pass the shot was completely overexposed now I don't spend a lot of time on the selfie cameras it's usually there's a tool of convenience rather than it being a proper tool for content creation the Asus has a rear camera selfie mode which beeps at you when it detects a face but I was kind of shocked to see that the rear camera selfie mode saved a far lower quality pic than what you can generate from the front-facing camera and and of course beauty mode makes you look super plasticy that I have terrible skin but this doesn't really help me here we have a handful of other fun features to play with I tried to make the depth-of-field mode work which should better blur the background behind your subject but I honestly can't see any difference when using it I did like the super resolution mode though it takes a little bit longer to scan through your shot but it quadruples the resolution this could be great for situations where you think you might need to crop after the shot now looking at some nighttime photos again I'm pleasantly surprised to see how little this camera over exposes it does over expose to be sure I still think it's over by about a third of a stop to a half a stop but this is where cameras like the g4 will often completely blow out street signs and billboards on its own the Asus is producing a bright image but is just barely holding onto those highlights I think Asus has found a happy balance here between exposing in low and mixed lighting and reining in noise I don't mind a little grain in my low-light shots I greatly prefer a little more noise over blurring out all the detail with heavy-handed noise reduction but I did run into a few shots though where the camera radically boosted the lighting when it completely didn't need to like on this creepy tunnel shot it's almost two stops brighter than it needs to be which produces a ton of ISO noise moving to even lower light this creepy gate which is lit by a really gross yellow security light the Asus is splitting the difference between the white of the gate and the yellow lighting whenever I have to choose I usually side with the colour of the lighting now think about situations like concert photography do you care more about accurate skin tone or capturing a cool shot of crazy light on stage thanks to the manual controls here I can get a little closer to what this gate looks like in real life on this walkway shot the asu's absolutely nailed the color differences between these two lights which aren't the same color temperature I think overall we're seeing good dynamic range for example the amount of wall that still has visible texture and isn't completely blown out below those lights it's not class-leading performance but I'd say we're doing better than mid-pack getting into an extremely low light situation this yellow flower lit by a porch light a couple yards away I just couldn't quite land a clear shot even with the image stabilization helping smooth out my handshake what is impressive though is the laser focus did lock pretty quickly on the subject even in bad light this kind of lighting is very difficult for iPhones and galaxies to lock focus and Asus joins LG in providing a pretty consistent lock in low-light and if you're worried about maximizing available light there is a low resolution low light mode it works by cranking the ISO and then shrinking the image down to a two megapixel shot to help reduce noise it's also somewhat inconsistent though it made the street scene and creepy tunnel brighter but it made the walkway shot darker and kept the flower photo about the same and not talking about a gimmicky mode but having full manual controls gives us the ability to easily play with long exposures and the ASIS delivers up to a 32 second exposure that's absolutely overkill for a streaking tail light photo but you could probably use it to produce some fun star trail nighttime sky shots just a couple indoor shots to check out keeping my office cosy with a single lamp the zenfone lands a pretty respectable capture of stationary objects this is one fifteenth of a second though so people moving around would certainly blur the flashes on the back of the zoom aren't the most powerful I've ever seen but they might help you lend a slightly faster shutter speed I just think most phone shots with a flash look kind of terrible we use the flash because we have to and again indoors with comfy lighting the front-facing camera shot looks awful but it did perform better than I thought it would now moving over to video I am disappointed to see the zoom is saving a fairly low bitrate the bitrate is the amount of data stored per second and just like mp3 the lower that number is the the quality scenes with lots of fine detail just look buzzy and I'm seeing some banding and compression artifacts in the blue of the sky it's not quite uniform we see the same performance in terms of exposure and saturation that we saw with still photos and again I'm happy to see how restrained the brightness is during daytime shots but I still think most shots are overexposed by around a third or a half and we do still have access to manual controls while shooting video which is pretty great exposure and white balance adjustments are easy to perform while composing a shot now here in video we can get a better look at the zoom a 3x zoom doesn't sound like a lot but it's a healthy amount of reach compared to what we usually get on our phones by cropping an image as the lens is shifting elements around we will usually lose focus and need to refocus once the zoom pull has been completed and we're actually changing the focal length of this lens not just cropping in on an image for video and stills Hardware zoom retains the full resolution and image integrity we can also take a better look at the optical image stabilization trying to walk as smoothly as possible we see active lens elements trying to rein in my hand movements but still jumping on individual footfalls this is pretty good performances walking is really hard to smooth out and we don't see that crazy jell-o shake from cameras like the lumia 950 or LG v10 we can activate a hybrid hardware and software stabilization which reigns in my footfalls but I've always hated how this combo stabilization looks on any phone Hardware stabilization is shaking the lens which does subtly warp the frame and then software takes that crop sit and pans through the frame to eliminate larger movements or gestures but the results always look buzzy err or Twitter then standalone software stabilization like that found on the iPhone 6s I would really prefer being able to use one or the other but I never like using both in sunlight we have a respectable 30 frames per second HD but no option for 60 frames per second so folks looking for liquidy smooth action will be disappointed I am seeing occasional stutters or dropped frames but on the whole performance has been pretty consistent audio is surprisingly solid it approach the work being done by HTC or the Microsoft Lumia team but we have a high quality stereo audio track with good noise reduction which avoids the warble e distortion we sometimes hear on LG's phones now twirling through an exposure transition test moving from dark to bright and back the zenfone makes adjustments in small steps which are fairly nice these adjustments don't happen as quickly as I would like but they are even-handed we just won't see the really pretty blooming adjustments that a galaxy or an iPhone can perform though it was in moving from bright back to dark I started seeing more twitchiness and an unpleasant shimmering effect in high contrast parts of the frame now this made me nervous and unfortunately the reason for this was confirmed while shooting at night that the zenfone will scale back the frame rate when in lower light situations this is a huge pet peeve of mine and makes footage from this camera very difficult to edit at night we can drop as low as 20 frames per second now this is done to give each frame a little more light one twentieth of a second as opposed to one thirtieth of a second but it also reduces the quality of movement in your video everything is just going to look a blurrier or streaky err and this is very disappointing I know consumers are going to be impressed by brighter looking video but scaling back the frame rate usually just ends up looking a mess the slow motion mode is also disappointing the zenfone doesn't seem to slow down time as much as it just creates a really slow playing slideshow I just can't see anyone really using this or liking it on the flip side we have a very usable time-lapse mode setting the zenfone up in my brento pan lapse it was super easy to get a panning shot representing hours of real-time scale down to less than a minute of footage so where does that leave us with the camera on the Asus zenfone zoom but so much of this analysis comes down to price when I started playing with the zoom I could only find unlocked models on Amazon for around five hundred and thirty bucks and this is simply not acceptable performance for that much money however a soos did promise a more reasonable price for the United States unlocked model and now on B&H we can find them for $399 at $400 I'm more inclined to say this is a good camera this phone is built around one specific feature a hardware zoom which is a rarity and is well executed here for the most part where I have concerns though is in comparing the output from this camera to other devices around this price point ignoring the hardware zoom for a second flagship phones from 2015 are dropping far enough in price to put pressure on this Asus looking specifically at a phone like the LG g4 we of course lose out on the reach of the Asus lens but we'd get a higher resolution on a larger image sensor giving us better dynamic range and shallower depth of field this puts me in a bit of a bind for who I would recommend the zoom to it would have to be someone who cares enough about photography and video to want a convenience feature like a hardware zoom but someone who is a little less discerning about lens clarity and video performance I'm sure that person exists and they will be really happy with this camera but I'm not sure I can point to anyone in my circles of family and friends who fit that mold as always folks thanks so much for watching be sure to subscribe for our full coverage of the Asus zenfone zoom now this camera review is a new series on pocket now and it won't continue without your support it takes a significant amount of work to produce this much footage so above commenting and liking sharing will be greatly appreciated galaxy s7 s and LG g5 s are right around the corner and you know you want to see real reviews of those cameras right for pocket now I'm Juan Carlos bag now you can tap me up on Instagram and Twitter as some gadget guy and I will catch you all on the next review you