The Scandal of the Samsung Galaxy A5’s Front Camera
I’m not what you would call selfie-obsessed, but when I found myself in the market for a new smartphone recently I decided that a good front camera was a must. I make educational YouTube videos, and since my budget of zero dollars does not allow for an assistant, the ability to record myself was crucial.
Within my price range, there are few cameras on the market that offered a good, bright front camera. On paper, the Samsung Galaxy A5 seemed the perfect choice: 16Mp front and back, and full HD recording capabilities as standard regardless of the camera.
On repeated visits to the various electronics stores near where I live, I was often directed to the A5; the screen was great, the overall specs superb, and yes, I was assured, the front camera will give me what I need.
If only I knew then what I know now.
The Samsung Galaxy A5’s front camera suffers from a serious design flaw, and it is scandalous that Samsung have neither addressed the problem, nor even accepted it as such.
After I bought the phone I went to England to visit my mother; while there I tried taking a few selfies. Some came out well, others less so. I began to wonder, when I zoomed in on my latest attempt, if the autofocus was not performing well. I tried the old trick of long-pressing the screen on where I wanted the camera to focus, and although the exposure then became locked, nothing seemed to be changing in any other respect.
By then my suspicions had been fully aroused. I took two sample shots. In the first, I held the phone uncomfortably close to my face. This, for me, is not ideal selfie territory: nobody wants to see me from this close up, and besides — nothing remains of the background. It’s literally a selfie, with none of the context that would otherwise redeem the shot.
However, the results were good. The image was sharp, and given the poor lighting conditions, tonal contrast and colour rendition were perfectly acceptable. But my face was not: from so close in, I looked more bloated than usual.
I held the camera at arm’s length and took another photo.
Suddenly, I had lost clarity. As you can see from the crop below, the focus is clearly out.
How strange! I thought. Perhaps I had a defective model, and that returning the unit to the shop for repair would help. Unfortunately, a quick Google search revealed that here again I was wrong.
The front camera is simply badly designed.
There are many forum posts that highlight the soft focusing of the Galaxy A5, and many of these are on Samsung’s own forums. The first response of the moderators is to get the customer to run some in-camera diagnostics, but after carrying out some further digging of my own, I think this approach highly ingenuous.
First of all, I found this comment:
This faux acknowledgement of the problem had me running straight to the Samsung product page — surely something as major as fixed focus would be clearly highlighted? Oh no — you have to be a master of reading between the lines to notice. Can you? Look at this text pulled from the specs sheet. What’s missing? It hardly jumps out at you:
So — no mention is made of the front camera’s auto focus abilities. Taking Samsung literally, we can understand that this absence is a declaration that there is no such functionality built into the phone’s front camera. But surely if something that we would otherwise take for granted is missing, it needs to be clearly stated up front? There are cameras — to take one example — that have no microphone port. On their specifications sheet you would expect to see mention made of that fact; you would not simply assume that if nothing is mentioned about a microphone port that there isn’t one to begin with.
For such a selfie-centric phone, it’s odd too that there are so few selfies on the product page. The one below, taken from the Samsung site, looks like an impossibility to me now — how did so many people fit into the frame if I can barely get my own face into the shot? I wish I had a higher-resolution image to look at; that said, even this low-resolution file suggests that the focus isn’t quite on the nose.
But what of the reviews?
I did not buy the Galaxy A5 on a whim. Aside from the various salesmen who suggested that this phone was my best choice, there were a half-dozen reviews that I worked through carefully to make sure that my decision was sound.
This TechRadar review laments the lack of OIS, but makes no mention of the front camera’s focusing ability, and there are no selfies to be had in their sample gallery.
Trusted Reviews seem to contradict themselves in their review: when they say “The front-facing camera matches the rear for basic specs, with a 16-megapixel sensor and f/1.9 aperture. There’s no autofocus, and general focusing is surprisingly slow, but selfies are super-sharp.” How can selfies be super-sharp if they are out of focus? What is ‘general focusing’? To understand this, in the absence of autofocus there should at least be some mechanism to allow for manual focusing of the front camera — but there is not.
TechAdvisor misses the focus issue too, unironically saying “Samsung is targeting the selfie-loving younger generation with this handset.”
PhoneArena were not blown-away by the quality of the front camera, but saw no problems with the focusing; however, they neglected to share any selfies in their sample gallery of 30+ photos.
The conspiracy theorist in me began to suspect some kind of collusion on the part of the tech review sites. Did they know about this problem? Had Samsung warned them not to mention it? I’m probably overstating my case enormously here, and I don’t want to stray into libel territory, but even this casual investigation suggests something fishy.
I went back to the Samsung brand shop where I had bought the phone; the experience of trying to return the handset was not a gratifying one. It didn’t help that I’m an Englishman living in Poland, with limited ability in communicating in the local language, but the manager was not interested in my complaints at all. As far as he was concerned, I had bought the phone with my eyes open, and must live with the consequences.
But here I feel he is wrong.
When I originally bought the phone, I specifically stated to the salesman that the front camera was important to me (I have checked the Polish I used to make this statement, and I have been assured that what I said was perfectly sensible), and I described the kinds of photos and videos I wanted to make with the camera. Surely this is a plain case of being mis-sold an item. Furthermore, it is obvious that the salespeople in this shop devoted only to Samsung products are in the dark; when I returned to make my complaint, my opening gambit was to ask the salesperson if I should buy a selfie-stick. He nodded vigorously and cast his eye about for one to sell me; but when I explained to him the problem with the front camera’s fixed focus, he looked at me, perplexed and aghast.
Which mirrored my own reaction quite accurately.
