Gadgetory

for as good as our phone cameras have gotten the one feature often lacking due to space limitations is the ability to zoom a soos made that the crown jewel feature of the zenfone zoom utilizing some interesting hardware to provide for an optical zoom lens but how does it stack up against a very different kind of zoom camera phone it's time for a showdown i'm juan carlos Pagnell for PocketNow and here's our camera zoom battle between the asus zenfone zoom and the nokia lumia 1020 the criteria for this battle two phone cameras that focus on zooming but which don't bolt on telescoping lenses protruding from the rear casing a soos achieves this by using periscope style prisms that slide lens elements internally and this is why the actual rear-facing lenses off-center on the camera module nokia achieved their zoom on the 1020 by utilizing a 2/3 inch sensor with 41 million pixels allowing users to crop away a lot of information before degradation wrecks the image even though the 1020 is several years old it still stands as a high-water mark for what manufacturers can do with software pixel resampling as the asus does not have an option for raw output we're looking at the highest quality JPEGs each phone can produce immediately for the nokia we see a clear difference between high res and low res output the high res capture looks more like what we might imagine a raw capture to look like lower contrast lower saturation and almost no sharpening applied to the image the a su saves a more saturated image which on first glance looks a bit juicier is more ie pleasing but this style of processing can often run into issues like with the transition from the green ground to the blue sky for editing it's a lot more difficult pulling saturation out of the Asus image than it is to add a little more color to the Nokia image for stills the one-third inch sensor and the smaller F 2.7 maximum aperture of the Asus struggles to keep up with the depth of field the Lumia can produce objects in the background of Asus photos are more identifiable and the Lumias 2/3 inch sensor produces a softer and prettier blur to busy background looking at macro shots at the wide end the Asus will get you closer to your subject with a minimum focusing distance around 2 inches the 1020 will force you to stand a little farther away around 5 inches from your subject but here's where we start looking at zooming viejas has a 3x optical zoom while the Lumia 1020 shooting stills falls somewhere around a 2.7 X digital crop zoom for stills the trouble with hardware zoom as lens elements are shifted to change the focal length that also changes your minimum focusing distance and pushes the ASIS farther away from the subject and closer to around a foot from what you're trying to focus on you will end up with a closer final image than when shooting fully wide but it won't provide that super macro look of getting scientifically close up to your subject the Lumia zooms by cropping the image down to around a 5 megapixel capture but lens focal length doesn't change that means your minimum focusing distance stays about the same and you're able to get significantly closer to your subject though this will result in a lower resolution image we see similar performance moving the longer shots and landscapes when not pushing each camera to its minimum focusing distance we see a perfectly reasonable 5 megapixel capture from the Lumia which is bested in terms of reach by the ASIS when we account for resolution maybe the fairest comparison might be cropping the ASIS photo down to a 5 megapixel image after zooming in and here we see a pretty close battle moving the video the Nokia is able to extend its zoom range thanks to the lower resolution of HD video providing an almost 6 X digital zoom as video normalizes the output to 1920 by 1080 there really aren't any situations where the Zen phones hardware was able to score a clear victory in daylight the 1020 is able to reach farther and the camera produces a clearer image with more detail the Lumia also wins for low-light video performance both cameras produce some pretty ugly noise but the Lumia is preserving more detail while also maintaining a faster frame rate the Asus Falls from 30 frames per second in daylight to 20 frames per second at night where the 1020 maintains 30 frames per second throughout so where's that leave us between the asus zenfone zoom and the Nokia Lumia 1020 it's always fun to go back and pick up a 1020 it was an audacious camera experiment for having shot on the latest crop of LG's and Samsung's it's no longer an indomitable camera the zenfone zooms solution is undeniably techy cool but it comes with some of the image compromises we used to see an inexpensive point-and-shoot camera zoom lenses what is a bit disappointing is seeing how da su struggles to compete against a two-and-a-half-year-old dual-core Lumia they trade blows for photo performance especially when normalizing for resolution though the sensor size advantage on the 1020 can often produce the more photographic image but for video the 1020 scores clear victories across the board if the Intel chipset in the Asus have been capable of UHD video capture with this Hardware zoom the verdict might have been different this is neat of a niche territory not only phones built around their respective cameras but the zoom action on those cameras honestly there's room for both solutions in this market at 1020 with a current generation Snapdragon processor could be a compelling content creation tool ditto is n phone zoom with slightly clearer optics ultimately I have to give the overall win to the 1020 but every time I pick up this phone I realize how much better the overall photo and video experience has gotten on devices like the v10 note 5 in lumia 950 now we're sure you have thoughts so let's hear them in the comments below is there room in the smartphone market for proper zoom camera phones is Microsoft missing out by not releasing an updated version of the Lumia 1020 now let's see if we can get into some fun debates as always thanks so much for watching be sure to subscribe for this channel for more reviews and comparisons like these and hit that thumbs up button to help us out with a little positive reinforcement we're pocket now I'm Juan Carlos bag now you can chat me up on Twitter and in gram is some gadget guy I will catch you all on the next video