Introduction and design
Samsung's at it again: trying to combine a high end camera and a smartphone with the Galaxy K Zoom.
Given its Galaxy Camera and Samsung Galaxy S4 Zoom devices are expensive and a difficult sell to the average consumer, be it through price or design, I was half expecting the range to be scrapped in 2014, at least on the phone side.
But it's back again in the 'super-camera-phone' market, this time with the Galaxy K Zoom. The K denotes a different product line for the South Korean brand, and while it's spiritually the successor to the S4 Zoom, it's the start of a new segment.
It's a shame actually, as the K Zoom is a more worthy device of the S name than any camera-focused smartphone Samsung has launched so far.
A sleeker chassis and powerful innards make it quite similar to the Samsung Galaxy S5, and with the rubberised and dimpled back there are a lot of design similarities too.
Given we probably won't see a Galaxy S5 Active (thanks to the current model being pretty robust) and the S5 Zoom not happening, the Galaxy S5 Mini is probably the only offshoot from the main brand, and that's something Samsung is keen to preserve given the rebooted K series.
I'm not sure why it's gone for K - it seems a straight rip-off of Sony Ericsson's K series, which stands for Kamera, the Swedish word for... well, I'll leave you to work that out.
But Samsung isn't giving up at forcing a camera-first smartphone onto the masses - can it compete with the likes of the Nokia Lumia 1020 to really steal the title of best camera phone?
Design
The design of the K Zoom is very Samsung. If you've held a device from the brand recently, you'll know just what I mean. The back, as I've said, is rubberised and very grippable, which seems to have negated the need to have a massive handle on the back to take more stable pics.
One of the key problems with the Samsung Galaxy S4 Zoom was the fact it was just SO huge, meaning it didn't sit very well in the pocket, the normal resting place for your smartphone. The K Zoom is actually larger in height and average thickness, but is a lot sleeker.
With that in mind, you needed to really, really want a powerful camera on your daily communication device - while there weren't any official sales figures touted, it didn't seem to be flying off the shelves.
With the K Zoom Samsung is doing something differently here - namely, trying to make it look more like a smartphone than before. Think more Lumia 1020, with a massive protrusion on the rear, rather than a full on lens and grip.
I managed to misplace it a couple of times by putting the K Zoom in my pocket and forgetting it was there, showing that if you don't mind a bit of extra heft you can easily live with it and still get sharp pictures.
The 20.2mm thickness is over double that of most smartphones, but when you consider that Samsung has wedged in a 10x optical zoom in there too, it makes a lot of sense that you'd have to have some small sacrifices.
This sadly, and confusingly, doesn't lead to a larger battery - in fact, it's actually smaller than the main flagships on the market at 2430mAh, which is lower even than the HTC One M8.
Given one of the hardest elements of the phone will be taking pictures with the screen fired up I'm astounded Samsung has decided to go this low.
The rest of the phone is as you'd expect from Samsung - light enough at 200g but also feeling a little cheaper thanks to the plastic used around the edges.
This material doesn't always mean it shouldn't feel premium, but I really struggle to feel like the faux-chrome is worthy of the higher price tag the likes of the K Zoom will command from Samsung.
The screen is also a little below the spec I'd expect, given the K Zoom shares a lot of features with the Galaxy S5. At 1200 x 720 it's not even full HD, despite the 4.8-inch size, and while I don't think you HAVE to have a 1080p display in every device, that sharpness will translate to your choice of photos, which arguably look better on the S5 thanks to higher PPI.
It's still Super AMOLED HD, which means it shines brightly enough, but the K Zoom has a screen that feels like one from an upgraded Galaxy S3 and that feels a little old hat to me. It does give the battery less to do in terms of firing fewer pixels, but I think I'd rather have the sharpness.
Camera
So - onto the main element of the Samsung Galaxy K Zoom: the 20.7MP backside illuminated CMOS sensor, designed to be larger, take in more photons and generally be the best snapper you could want in your pocket.
Samsung has clearly slanted the K Zoom towards the more discerning snapper, but not to the point of rivalling a DSLR by any means.
There's a lot of effort being put into automating the process of taking a picture, be it Pro Suggest (which assesses the scene and chooses a filter / mode for you) or just the dizzying array of scene choices, from Snow to Fireworks to Waterfall.
It's bewildering to the average user, who probably will use around a quarter of the modes in general use. But then you can do some cooler things like split the auto-focus and auto-exposure, which means you can have the scene zoomed on the area you like and then choose to raise or lower the exposure by tapping on another area.
It takes a little experimentation, but when you get it right you can dramatically change the composition of the shot - silhouettes in particular come out well, although you'll generally need a couple of attempts to get it right.
Sadly / brilliantly (depending on your stance) the K Zoom also comes with the ability to take automatic selfies. Rather than having to use the wide-angle front sensor, you can choose where on the screen you want to be, turn K Zoom main lens towards you and keep wiggling it until you hear the beep.
It takes a few seconds, but the result is a high-quality picture of yourself with your favourite celebrity / at a life-changing event / let's be honest, in your bedroom trying to see what it would look like with your hair parted the other way.
In a wider context, the feature set on the Galaxy K Zoom camera is pretty strong, with a lot of power behind the sensor.
But what about auto mode? Someone who wants the ability to take pictures quickly and effectively without having to think seems to be the user Samsung is targeting here, and an automatic scene-sorter is crucial to them.
In short: it wasn't that impressive. The method of booting up was slow (faster than the S5 if you chose the lockscreen camera icon, admittedly) where you needed to hold the volume up key and the shutter button together from sleep to start the camera.
I've never had a problem just using the shutter key to achieve this, and it takes a while to get used to.
The 10x zoom was picky - you can pinch the screen to set the zoom, which was cool, but being exact was harder, even with the volume keys to perform the same thing. And there was supposed to be a button that instantly zoomed in 10x, but using this was odd. It would zoom to required level, pause, and then keep going into the digital range.
Seemed a bit pre-production to me in that respect.
The overall picture quality, as you can see below, is pretty strong still. Burst mode, Xenon flash or just general shots came out pretty well, although erred heavily on the higher side of exposure when compared to something similar, like the Nokia Lumia 1020 or a dedicated prosumer camera.
The manual mode didn't seem easy to use either, with elements like ISO and Exposure the only think you can manually alter from the screen. This might have been me not being able to find the wider range of options, but they were pretty hidden.
The camera interface was as strong as usual from Samsung, with everything available in a small grid from which you could drag them into a 'quick launch' bar at the side for general use.
It's odd that a camera of this power doesn't allow you to record in 4K – I'm no advocate of that functionality, as it's a battery, space and time waster with very little use – as it sends a mixed message from Samsung, namely one that says 4K video capture is mostly a gimmick at this stage.
Pro Suggest also allows you to download more themes from the Samsung store and with some hilarious choices as you can see below.
This automation makes it hard to understand which market the K Zoom is aimed at: will the general consumer who wants a decent photo now and then be willing to pay for the lower-specced device?
And will the photography hobbyist want to put up with the extra pocket heft and price when they will probably find the Galaxy S5 (or other smartphone flagship) an acceptable substitute when they've left the big DSLR at home?
It all depends on price, which will have a big bearing on who will actually buy the K Zoom.
Camera samples
Please note: the following samples are from pre-production hardware / software
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Features, interface and early verdict
In terms of features, the Samsung Galaxy K Zoom feels a lot like a stripped down S5, which is again odd given the differentiation that the company is trying to instil between the two.
S Health Lite is onboard (I've not drilled down into exactly what this means, but I'm guessing that some of the more advanced heart-rate and exercise features will have been stripped out) and Kids Mode is added too, showing that Samsung does intend the K Zoom to be a device that you'll use as a normal smartphone.
Then again, it's not the easiest to hold thanks to the slightly unbalanced nature of the phone, which of course comes from the lens on the top.
The storage issue is potentially a big one though. There's only 8GB on board, of which you'll lose around 2GB through the integrated system needs.
That still leaves you a pretty hefty 6GB of space, which won't fill up that quickly if you use the K Zoom only for photography. But given it's also meant to be a modern smartphone you'll struggle quickly with apps and music coming on board.
You can expand the amount of space available through the microSD slot, up to 64GB if you've got a microSDXC card to hand. I'm not sure why you can't have a 128GB iteration of the technology in there, but Samsung claims it's not supported.
My worry is that Samsung phones seem to suffer unless you have the right memory card (of sufficient quality) in the phone. The Gallery will run slowly, some apps won't open as fast as you'd like and other problems abound if you don't keep enough space available.
And 8GB simply isn't enough, and the notion that you have to buy a memory card to use the K Zoom properly doesn't seem fair.
On the processor side things are a little better though: you've got a hexa-core CPU in there, according to Samsung. This is only technically true as it's actually a 1.3GHz quad-core and 1.7GHz dual-core option on offer. The former is for the heavy lifting of picture processing and the latter for general smartphone use.
It's a method that's been bandied about for a while, and should help preserve battery life... if it works correctly, and often these things don't. I've no reason to think this will be the case here, and the K Zoom ran pretty fluidly when I was testing.
Interface
The Samsung Galaxy K Zoom is a decent enough phone to use with the screen bright and vivid and packing the same upgraded TouchWiz UI that debuted with the S5 in Barcelona this year.
The interface is clean and obvious - when you slide downwards from the top of the screen things look a little more next-gen than before.
Sliding through the phone was a breeze, as you'd hope it would be with a quad-core 1.3GHz processor running the show for the heavier tasks. 2GB of RAM is more than enough in my eyes, although I'm still waiting for Samsung to give more details on the CPU actually used at the heart.
Early verdict
The Samsung K Zoom is the sort of device that's hard to categorise. The best thing about the Samsung K Zoom is the camera, which won't surprise anyone. But I'm not talking about the quality of the pictures - which, in the pre-production sample I played with weren't amazing - but the fact it's so simple to get up and running with the device.
The design is much, much better than the chunk-arific Samsung Galaxy S4 Zoom, which has all manner of unwanted protrusions. The K Zoom is a sleeker and lighter, making it more acceptable for smartphone use.
The problem for me here – aside from the fact the screen is too low-res, the internal memory and battery too small in capacity and it could be a bit expensive – is the fact I still don't really know who this phone is for.
Samsung says it's equally applicable for the parent capturing their child's first steps as it is for friends on a night out – but that says that the average consumer would be interested in the K Zoom.
They wouldn't, unless they had a strong inclination to own a good camera phone for the sake of it. If photography was more of a hobby to you, then you'd probably want to invest the extra cash in a more powerful dedicated camera or smartphone with better spec list.
So having spent a decent chunk of time with the K Zoom, I still find myself unsure as to why Samsung is making it.
It's chunkier than the likes of the Nokia Lumia 1020 and seems to have a comparable, if not lower, performance in picture-taking and it's also much heftier than the flagship Samsung Galaxy S5, which the brand has spent a long time telling the world about, especially in terms of its photography capabilities.
So who, as I asked before, is this phone for? Is the K Zoom something a parent would carry around to capture that moment of their child doing something important? Or is it a replacement for the compact camera that one person on a night out always seems to carry?
Iif Samsung is just playing the long game (staying in this camera / smartphone zone until the tech comes good), the K Zoom makes a lot of sense – but this model doesn't seem to have enough of a strong angle to attract a purchase (unless it comes in at a ludicrously cheap price).
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