Samsung Galaxy S 5 Review
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Joshua Ho on April 8, 2014 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Samsung
- Mobile
- Galaxy S 5
Camera Architecture & Still Image Analysis
Samsung's real potential has yet to be realized as a highly vertically integrated silicon and device house. The Galaxy S 4 for example still relied on a Qualcomm SoC with a Sony sensor for the rear facing camera. While the GS5 continues to leverage Qualcomm's silicon, Samsung did transition to its own sensor for the rear camera module as well as the front facing camera.
The front facing camera remains 1080p, despite competitors like HTC moving to 5MP. The front camera uses a 16:9 sensor with 1.12µm pixels shooting at 1080p.
| Samsung Galaxy S 5 Camera | ||||
| GS5 | ||||
| Front Camera | 2MP | |||
| Front Camera - Sensor |
S5K8B1YX (1.12µm, 1/7.3") |
|||
| Front Camera - Capture Resolution | 1920 x 1080 | |||
| Front Camera - Aspect Ratio | 16:9 | |||
| Front Camera - Focal Length | 1.2mm | |||
| Front Camera - Max Aperture | f/2.4 | |||
| Rear Camera | 16MP | |||
| Rear Camera - Sensor |
S5K2P2XX (1.12µm, 1/2.6") |
|||
| Rear Camera - Capture Resolution | 5312 x 2988 | |||
| Rear Camera - Aspect Ratio | 16:9 | |||
| Rear Camera - Focal Length | 4.8mm | |||
| Rear Camera - Max Aperture | f/2.2 | |||
The rear camera is the interesting one as it uses Samsung's own 16MP 16:9 sensor. This makes the GS5 and M7/M8 the only two modern shooters we have with 16:9 rear facing sensors. The GS5 unfortunately doesn't move to larger pixels, remaining at 1.12µm. To somewhat improve low light performance, Samsung is using its own ISOCELL technology to reduce crosstalk between pixels by introducing additional barriers between individual pixels. The video below does a decent job at summarizing what we know about ISOCELL:
Unlike Apple and HTC, there's no dual-color flash on the GS5 - just a single LED unit.
As always we turn to a collection of controlled test shots and live scenes to evaluate the GS5's camera quality.
Spatial Resolution
We'll start by measuring the rear facing camera's ability to resolve fine details by shooting at an ISO12233 test target. For now we'll be looking at horizontal and vertical resolution using the sagittal and tangential lines in the upper right of the center of the test chart:
ISO12233 captured by Galaxy S 5
The gallery below has links to the original chart captures for all of the phones compared in this review:
The GS4 already did well in this test, easily resolving the entire length of sagittal lines. The GS5 maintains slightly more detail past the 18 mark (units of line pairs per image height). The iPhone 5c and 5s do reasonably well here but can't resolve detail as well at the very left edge of the crop. Google's Nexus 5 has similar struggles, although nothing is anywhere near as bad as HTC's M8. Here we see the real limits of HTC's 4MP UltraPixel sensor as there's serious aliasing around the 12 mark. Sony's Xperia Z1s running in its native 20MP mode on the other hand is the clear winner here.
You can see full 1:1 resolution crops in the gallery below:
The story is unchanged if we look at the tangential crops as well. The GS4 and GS5 remain among the upper contenders in this space, losing out only to Sony's Z1s. Interestingly enough the GS5's image appears to be softer than what the GS4 produced. We'll have to spend some more time with Samsung's ISOCELL sensor to really get a feel for the images it produces.
Outdoor Scenes (Day & Night)
We grabbed test shots from four different locations using the GS5 and its immediate competitors. I've included all of the originals in the galleries below, but let's take a look at crops from a couple of them first.
I'll start with a low light test shot as that's one of the more challenging environments for such a sensor with such tiny pixels. Here we'll be able to see just how much ISOCELL buys us:
The GS5 shot this scene at 1/15s, ISO 2000. The GS4, by comparison, kept the shutter speed the same but ran at ISO 1000. The GS5 is naturally brighter as a result, but without substantially more noise. The image is relatively usable. Toggling picture stabilization (the new word for night mode on the GS5) trades off noise for exposure length, although Samsung obscures the latter in its exif data. When shooting without a tripod, longer exposure times aren't desirable (particularly without OIS).
The GS5's low light performance obviously pales in comparison to devices with larger pixels like the M8 and especially the iPhone 5s. There's an obvious tradeoff here. Samsung delivers clearly better spatial resolution (as seen from our ISO12233 test shots), while HTC on the other hand offers better low light performance. Apple finds itself in the middle of the two with the iPhone 5s. The Xperia Z1s does give us a good example of what you can get from oversampling as we're shooting in the 8MP superior auto mode here.
Moving to the opposite end of the spectrum, this daylight shot gives us an example of where the M8 clearly loses out to the GS5. You lose all details in the tree, and there's quite a bit of noise in the sky on the M8. The GS5 however delivers a substantially better shot.
Lab Scene
The next set of shots use a light controlled lab setup. Here we are immune to natural variances of sunlight and can do some true apples to apples comparisons.
The GS4 and GS5 are pretty close to one another in our scaled/cropped shot. There are some differences in color handling and dynamic range between the two devices. I actually find that there's some loss in detail in the paintbrush on the GS5 compared to the GS4. I've seen a number of situations where aggressive noise reduction on the GS5 seems to mangle detail and deliver a very oil painting like effect, although that's an extreme that we're not seeing here.
The GS5 once again defaults to 1/15s at ISO 2000, compared to the same exposure time but ISO 1000 on the GS4. Here we really see what Samsung's sensor can do as the resulting image goes from unusable on the GS4 to passable on the GS5. The final image isn't particularly great by any means but it's at least usable. If you're looking for ultimate low light winners here there really are only two: the 5s and the M8.
HDR
The GS5 has a very fast and usable HDR mode. You can toggle the mode on directly from the default camera UI (tap the icon on the left side of the display) and you get effectively instant HDR captures:
The GS5's HDR captures do a good job of retaining detail in the shadows while bringing in detail in the highlights.
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nerd1 - Wednesday, April 9, 2014 - link
Samsung still makes the most well-around and practical phone out there. It's funny so many people are crazing the metal stuff that bends and scratches without case.synaesthetic - Wednesday, April 9, 2014 - link
I used to love Samsung phones, but not so much anymore. If I'm going to spend 600 bucks on a phone, can we please stop making it feel like a toy? I'm not saying anything about using metal; Nokia's Lumia devices are made of polycarbonate but they feel rock-solid and excellently constructed.AMOLED? Meh. IPS is where it's at. AMOLED's oversaturated to the point of cartoonishness. With AMOLED, in six months of decently heavy use, tons of the blue subpixels burn out and the display gets weird unless you're very, very careful to make sure that all your subpixels wear evenly. White webpages drain the crap out of battery. I had a Galaxy Nexus for eighteen months (the one with the RGBG pentile matrix that's supposed to reduce the effects of subpixel burn out) and within half that time I had blue stripes where the status bar and nav bar were whenever I put it in landscape mode. IPS doesn't have this issue; my Nexus 4's screen looks exactly the way it did when it was new, eight months later.
The only new device I really care much about right now is the Xperia Z2. Sony phones have been awesome for a while now except for Sony's insistence on using crap screens, but the Z2's display is amazing. Not oversaturated, looks natural and fantastic, has great viewing angles... not to mention an sdcard slot and a gigantic battery.
Samsung doesn't sell a ton of phones because they're the best device, just like Apple doesn't. They both sell a ton of phones because they both spend a ridiculous amount of money on marketing.
ashleynelson548 - Wednesday, April 9, 2014 - link
My review is simple. Get in line and get this phone: http://amzn.to/1ksys3o - Got a chance to test it and this is one awesome phone. Finally Samsung got something right with the S5. I've had HTC & Samsung phones prior to the Galaxy series came out. And nothing has come close to this phone. Great resolution, great camera, love it still has a sd slot to expand your storage capacity along with the high gb internal memory. Lots of ways to tweak to your liking.SymphonyX7 - Thursday, April 10, 2014 - link
Anyone know how Anandtech measure the phone's power consumption? Do they just hook up a voltmeter between the battery terminals, get the voltage readout and compute from that?nerd1 - Thursday, April 10, 2014 - link
I think they used in-line powermeter.Stiv21 - Thursday, April 10, 2014 - link
This fake , here's flagshiphttp://pdadb.net/index.php?m=specs&id=6040&...
RonaldNCoady - Friday, April 11, 2014 - link
People who are been obsessed with stock experience pushed to their phones the minute Google announces a new update buy a Nexus phone. Everyone else buys the phone they feel best suits them. Most people teds to buy Galaxy S phones, simply because they are the best, and one of the very few with an OLED display. http://evo9.it/qr.net/aacrodex - Friday, April 11, 2014 - link
I really didn't get the capture latency part. Unlike iphone, android phones support continuous drive, so if you want to capture multiple photos, just don't release your finger.abufrejoval - Friday, April 11, 2014 - link
I am (actually more than a little) disappointed that Samsung is trying to do the right thing on one hand with the introduction of Knox for securely running enterprise applications on these devices, yet on the other hand not taking suffient care to really enable them to be what they are:Very small and portable yet incredibly powerful workstations, quite capable of replacing entry level PCs by just sticking them into (better placing them on a wireless) docking station, which has a set of full sized screens, keyboard and mouse connected to them so you can run either light office applications right off the phone or use Citrix (or any other terminal server protocol) for some heavier stuff, which still requires a beefy VDI to run.
To call them "phones" today is like calling a PC a "word processor": Sure that's how they started, but that's not what the have become.
I bought the Note 3 (like its predecessor, a Note 1) as a very personal workstation, also bought the docking station, which gave me HDMI video and audio out as well as 3 USB (2.0) ports, but I was extremely disappointed to find that the "handheld workstation" wouldn't properly initialize the Asix USB Ethernet adapter, which *every* Android I've ever tried works with out of the box.
And the monitor was little better: Even though the phone's screen is actually turned off with KitKat and orientation properly switches to landscape mode, all UI elements look groteskly swollen because they were sized to fit a 1080p resolution on a ~6" screen, but not the 32" LED TV I use on my desktop. Needless to say that word processing is no fun when letters are taller than your thumb.
Clearly the only use case Samsung seems to support via the HDMI port is watching movies: Something I don't need a workstation for.
After no essential Knox features or applications were forthcoming I went ahead and rooted my Note 3, essentially killing any chance of ever using Knox on that device now. With two "netcfg eth0 dhcp" commands in sequence I can now properly bring up Ethernet and thus connect to the securized office LAN and run Citrix, but with the built-in and fixed DPI settings all other desktop use is still painful to look at.
There are of course solutions to that problem: Any Parandroid ROM and derivative has wonderful multi-DPI support built in, but unfortunately since the MHL adapter in the Samsung devices doesn't have an open source driver, you immediately loose the HDMI connect, once you put one of these multi-DPI capable Androids on the workstation: Catch-22!
The only one who can fix this is Samsung and it doesn't look like they are using this opportunity to make their devices more appealing for enterprise use.
I have quite a number of Android devices and having a different flavour on each one of them would make them pretty unusable. So I put Omnirom on all my Galaxys (except the Note 3), my Nexus 4, 7, 10, Oppo Find 5, Asus TF101, Notion Ink Adam and even switched the return and menu keys around on all the Nexus devices to put them back where "God" (Samsung) intended them to be on my first Galaxy S, with home in the center.
And since the original launchers were always far too limited and boring I've been running SPB 3D shell on all of these devices for years, which gives me both speed and a nice look as well as a level of consistency across phone, portrait and landscape tablet sized Androids, not possible otherwise.
Custom Androids give me choice, configurability and privacy: Let the hardware vendors concentrate on creating the best workstation they can make and leave the OS alone!
I bought a post-PC darn it, like in "personal" not a blackmail subscription!
tomgadd - Sunday, April 13, 2014 - link
Why are the tester do not test audio quality??The background is, that people between 15-30 years do consume 90% of music on their smartphone. So it would be a smart move to give the audio quality a higher priority in the test.
Finally the S5 has in my view the best audio quality available on a smartphone these days.
A really smart move from samsung....that was formerly one of the key the departements of apple....Sadly the competitors needed a few years to understand the importance...