Phones and cameras go together like our proverbial carbonated beverage and biriyani. Okay so that's not really a proverb but sounds good? Let's see if the S4 Zoom has a delicious mix.
At first glance, it's bulky in an age when camera phones are all about being sleek. But this has 10x optical zoom lens equivalent to 24-240mm with image stabilization. That beats any smartphone that boasts digital zoom which as we know is just plain useless. There's a glass cover over the lens preventing accidental damage to lens cover. Hope it's also scratch proof.

Being a mini S4, it should be a capable phone but we're really here to see if it sets a bar as a camera as well. It features a 1/2.3" 16MP image sensor. Typical midrange point and click fare but terrific for a smartphone. You can select burst, panorama or macro for shooting that brightly colored flowerinsect we never see in real life. Sound & Shot records ambient sound with the photo. You can also make an animated GIF to create hilarious shots of friends nodding their heads as if they are syncing to Miley Cyrus. Ouch.
You can go almost full manual. Shutter speed, aperture, exposure and ISO, metering, sharpness, and so on. You use the ring around the lens to zoom and that's it. We were hoping it would offer options for controlling shutter speed and aperture at least. Hopefully a firmware update will add it later.
The photos show a lot of fine detail captured. Compared to typical smartphones, the response time is fast between turning it on and snapping a picture. You get 1080p video recording at 30fps or 60fps at 720p the latter being great for smooth action scenes. You won't get this mode on most other phones.

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What we didn't like was that hardware shutter button doesn't unlock the camera when the screen is locked. When screen is unlocked, you hold the camera button and it will activate after at least 2-3 seconds. It's faster just to hit the camera icon.
As a phone it has a dual core setup that's not the high stakes in tech now but powerful enough. What we liked is the 1.5GB of RAM that should become standard fare. The Mali-400 GPU during GPU benchmarking showed high marks for qHD gaming keeping it on par with its bigger, powerful version.
This will be loved by experimenting amateur photographers, vacationers and people with huge list of friends and family. Usually out on a trip, people have a separate camera. This will perform fast and with excellent results saving a lot of space.
Check out our online & FB page for sample shots.

Specs
Display: Super AMOLED & gorilla glass 3: 4.3 inches
OS: Android 4.2.2 CPU: 1.5 GHZ Dual Core
ROM: 8 GB  RAM: 1.5GB
Connectivity: LTE, HSUPA etc.
Camera: Primary 16MP & secondary 1.9MP. Has 1/2.33'' sensor size, touch focus, 10x optical zoom (24-240mm)
Sensors: Accelerometer, gyro, proximity, compass
Price: Tk. 47,500/-