Samsung Announces New Galaxy S4, With Tons of New Camera Features

Yesterday, at a bizarrely huge announcement, Samsung debuted the new Galaxy S4 smartphone. This is the newest flagship device from the giant South Korean gadget manufacturer, and while there are plenty of reasons why it’s an important new smartphone, Samsung have also added a plethora of new photo and video features to the device.

Many of these features are designed to take advantage of both the front and back cameras of the smartphone simultaneously, something we recently saw hit iOS with Dblcam. The Galaxy S4 has all these features built in, but we won’t know how well they function until the camera is released.

• the Dual Camera allows you to simultaneously photograph or video from both the front and back of the smartphone. You can then use built-in templates to splice the images together. You can also video chat with three views simultaneously: seeing what’s being sent to you, seeing what your phone’s rear camera records, and the front.
• Sound & Shot lets you attach audio files to your photos
• Drama Shot stitches together a series of pictures into a single, overlaid image
• Story Album organizes your images into custom albums for special events
• Cinema Photo allows you to animate a single spot in a photograph, creating a cinemagram like GIF

According to the press release, the full set of camera modes are: Dual Camera: Dual Shot / Dual Recording/ Dual Video Call; Drama Shot; Sound & Shot; 360 Photo; Cinema Photo; Eraser; Night; Best Photo; Best Face; Beauty Face; HDR (High Dynamic Range); Panorama; Sports.

While not strictly speaking photography related, the Galaxy S4 is also able to perform other tasks that photographers might like, like previewing files by hovering your finger over them, being used as an IR remote, it’ll even work with gloves on.

The Galaxy S4 features a 13-megapixel rear camera, 2-megapixel front camera, 441ppi 5-inch Full HD Super AMOLED screen, and is due out in the second quarter of this year.