Samsung Galaxy Camera (EK-GC100) Review

Sharpness

The 21x lens is good but not great. Our tests recorded up to 2400 MTF50s of detail, but only in very rare cases. Most of the time, sharpness hovered around 1500 MTF50s. As is often the case, detail was worst near the edges and corners of the frame, and increasing focal length to maximum also negatively impacted sharpness, knocking our figures down to 1000 MTF50s and below.

Results like this are slightly underwhelming by themselves, at least for a $500 camera, but they're compounded by severe use of software oversharpening. This is an artificial technique that makes photos look sharper, but also less natural, and our tests picked up as much as 41% oversharpening in some zones. What this means is the Galaxy Camera's best-performing zones are actually faked by editing, and shouldn't be regarded as an advantage of the lens. More on how we test sharpness.