Samsung Galaxy S3 vs Apple iPhone 4S: Camera

Apple iPhone 4S

The camera's had a major overhaul, now capable of taking eight-megapixel stills and recording 1080p video. Apple claims upgrades to the optics allow for more light, better colours and improved white-balancing. We didn't dismantle the 4S to find out, but did take a range of shots in a variety of conditions to test the assertion.

Photos are crisper, no question, but it can't compete with traditional cameras with bigger lenses in low light. You can now choose to have a grid on the screen when taking shots, perform basic image-editing within the Camera Roll and jump straight to the camera function via a shortcut.

iOS 5 brings with it the option to use the '+'  button as shutter when taking landscape shots. Face detection is also an upgrade and works well.

The 1080p, 30fps camera is impressive. Clarity and detail are excellent and the A5 processor allows for image stabilisation of the go. Shaky hand, be gone. We played back footage on our 47-inch TV and, even in full screen, video quality was great. We can hear the home camcorder industry wincing from here.

 

Samsung Galaxy S3

The rumoured 12MP camera sadly does not make an appearance. Instead the Galaxy S3 arrives with a perfectly reasonable 8MP/1080p camera, exactly the same as that on the HTC One X.

In burst mode, the camera takes contiunous shots at a rate of 6fps, then picks the best shot based on smile detection, blink detection, contrast and blurring. According to Samsung, the camera also has zero shutter lag along with an improved shot-to-shot time.

You'll be able to set up rules for photos to be automatically placed in groups based on faces, contacts or location. There's also Face Zoom which means that you can tap on a face when lining up a crowd shot and the camera will zoom in automatically. The lack of optical zoom means that this is going to be fairly limited, but we look forward to trying it out in the wild.

It also has a 1.9MP camera on the front, which suffices for profile pictures, video calls and the like. Curiously, that's actually smaller than the Galaxy S2's 2MP front camera sensor, but still a major improvement on the 4S' 0.3MP front-facing camera.

 

T3 Verdict: Samsung Galaxy S3

 

Samsung Galaxy S3 vs Apple iPhone 4S: Power

Apple iPhone 4S

The iPhone 4S is fired by a dual core A5 chip, which also has dual core graphics capabilities – that’s a x2 times faster CPU than the original iPhone 4 chip, according to Apple, and a whopping 7x faster graphics.

The faster A5 processor makes operating the device noticeably quicker when launching and re-launching apps and when using power-draining applications such as iMovie. Getting hands on with Notifications, Newsstand, iMessage and Reminders demonstrated to us just how much of a step up from iOS 4 it is.

The dual-core A5 is more than powerful enough to handle the components inside the iPhone 4S, but it doesn't stand up to the quad-core monsters being packed into Samsung and HTC's latest phones.

 

Samsung Galaxy S3

Samsung has put their own quad-core 1.4GHz Exynos processor into the Galaxy S3, and bolstered it with 1GB RAM. The quad-core processor certainly seemed to do the trick in the limited time that we had with the phone. There was barely any lag when switching between home screens and firing up apps.

Flash memory is available in 16, 32 and 64 GB versions, improving on the S2's 16GB offering, while there's also a micro SD card slot should you wish to expand the memory. There's also 50GB of free storage for your content on Dropbox for the next years, which is double what HTC is offering on its HTC One X.

 

T3 Verdict: Samsung Galaxy S3