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"So did you get me one?"
This was the question I got continually asked when I announced that somehow, I had managed to snag one of the rare Bruce Springsteen tickets for the 2023 Birmingham tour date.
The answer was always no.
I had got one, at great cost and the idea of buying two or more just never occurred to me (which was probably a mistake). Even my wife, inquired whether I had included her in my plans. My answer was a) you don't like hanging around stadiums for hours at end and b) You don't like Bruce Springsteen so I never thought about it
Therefore, although I had alienated my friends and family and friends, I had the consolation that after a 38-year hiatus, I had a date with the boss.
This however left me with two issues.
Firstly, I had not been to a major concert for about 30 years (Dropping my daughter off to watch Harry Styles does not count).
My first worry was how do you get to these things nowadays.
Public transport would be most convenient, but trains in the UK rarely travel past 11, and if they do, I would be fighting with the other 80,000 revellers. So, driving seemed the only alternative, but where would I park and would the car be there when I get back? Also, how early would I need to get there to bag a spot in walking distance? As my family will testify, when travelling anywhere, I tend to assume the worst and leave about 3 days to travel 20 miles just in case of traffic jams, floods, alien invasion etc.
However, I came up with a cunning plan. I asked a friend who lived a mile away from Villa Park, whether I could park outside their house. Then in order to make sure I had a spot, I get there at 9 a.m., spend a day in Birmingham city centre, take the concert bus to the stadium and walk back to the car at the end.
You can now see why my family hate me making any travel arrangements.
So with transport solved, I came to my second issue. Obviously, I wanted to take photos, but the ticket regulations said that only pocket cameras could be taken, which I assume ruled out my Fuji XT-4 with a 150-400 lens and tripod. I had my Pixel 6a phone, but the seats were quite away from the stage, and I doubted its zoom capabilities would be adequate, so I really needed something small and with a good zoom lens
I then realised I had the perfect thing. My wife's late uncle had given me his entire collection of old compact cameras. I had done a quick review and put them to one side, but they were still usable. Of course, compact cameras are very much yesterday's technology, superseded by mobiles, but one seemed perfect for this.
The Samsung Galaxy Camera.
In its day, the Samsung Galaxy camera was cutting edge in compact camera technology, with a powerful zoom lens mated to an android phone body. In another universe it could of shaped the way cameras were made, but a combination of factors meant that mobiles took over as the phone of choice, so it never took off.
But that raised an intriguing question. Could a dedicated 10 year old camera compete with a modern phone camera ?
This seemed a great opportunity to find out and at the same time explore the differences between phone cameras and dedicated devices, so I decided to take both round Birmingham and the concert to compare the results
First let's meet the competitors...
The Contenders
In the blue corner:-
The Samsung Galaxy Camera
Released in 2012, it boasts a 1/2.3" 16.3 Megapixel BSI CMOS sensorm supported by optical image stabilisation.
The camera allows speeds between 16 to 1/2000th of a second and has a ISO range of 100 to 3200
The lens provides a 21x optical zoom between a focal length of 4.1 to 86.1 mm (23-481mm equivalent full frame focal length), and has an aperture range from F2.8-5.9
The camera has a 4.8" (122 mm) LCD touch screen with a resolution 1280 x 720 pixels
The camera supports video 1080p 30 fps video capture, 120 fps slow-motion mode
The camera OS is based on Android 4.1 'Jelly Bean' operating system running on 1.4 GHz Quad-core processor. It has a dedicated Camera interface and will support apps like snapseed for simple photo processing. It supports WiFi, but not mobile network access.
Photos are stored on a SD card or 8GB internal memory. There is no RAW support
The camera has an integral pop up flash, which must be manually raised before use.
The camera measures 70.8x128.7 x19.1mm, and weighs a 300g without battery, which is removable. Power on from off is about 30 seconds, to 2 seconds from standby
In the red corner:-
The Google Pixel 6A
Released in 2021 it supports two rear cameras, a 12.2 Megapixel 1/2.55" wide camera with OIS and a 12 Megapixel ultra-wide camera.
The wide camera has a focal length 14 mm (24mm Full Frame equivalent) and a fixed f 1.7 Aperture , while the ultra-wide has a focal length of 17mm (16mm Full frame equivelent) with a fixed f2.2 Aperture.
The camera has a shutter speed range from 1/37000 to 8.3 seconds and a ISO range from 44 to 11,300,000
The pixel does support a 2x digital zoom function, but has no optical zoom.
The screen is a 6.1 in (150 mm) 1080p OLED screen with 2400 × 1080 px resolution.
The phones runs the very latest Android OS (13) on two Octa-core 2.80 GHz Cortex-X1 processors. The camera interface is the standard Google Pixel camera app, offering nightshot, portrait ,panorama modes, but a limited set of camera customization. The latest google camera app claims it has the latest A.I technology for photo sharpening and noise reduction.
The phone has 128Gb of internal storage, but this cannot be expanded. However, it supports mobile networks, so images can be offloaded to online storage on any 4G network.
The phone can capture video at 4K at 30 or 60fps and 1080p video at 30, 60, 120 or 240fps
The phone measures 52.2 mm (5.99 in) x 71.8 mm (2.83 in) and weighs 178 grams
The Test
The first test was a wonder around the heart of my home city, Birmingham. As a kid, Brum was a byword for ugly architecture, wrapped up in a ribbon of excessive roads and traffic. Those days are long gone.
Modern Birmingham has redesigned itself and continues to extinguish the last vestiges of 1960's concrete slabs. Nowhere is this more self-evident than Centenary Square, which contains one of UK's best libraries and some very photogenic scenes. Over the years it has undergone considerable redevelopment
Because I had a lot of time to kill, I decided to set base camp in the library and use it to explore the area.The great thing about the library is its free, has charging points for phones, and great views over the city from various galleries.
It was a lovely day in Birmingham, with bright blue skies. The sort of day that even a half decent camera will get great images with. Both devices gave good images. If I were picky, I felt the colours on the Samsung were stronger, but both gave usable results.
I did have a few issues with the Samsung, however. It was the first time I had really used it, so the controls were unclear. In bright sunlight, the screen was not always easy to read, and without any physical controls apart from the shutter, zoom control and power, it was sometimes difficult to see what I was doing.
Saying that, when I could see it, the Samsung camera user interface was very impressive, with great use of graphics to set everything from shutter speed to aperture. In contrast, one of the big weaknesses of all android cameras is that they give very little control over the camera settings. If you dig deep enough, you may find a few like shutter speed, but it is clear that android phones cameras are designed for minimal customization, which is generally an anathema to any serious photographer.
My main issue with the Samsung though was putting it in standby mode. The pixel was always ready at the double click on the on button. The Samsung however, due to the large lens size needed to be placed in standby when not in use and I could not always get it move from standby, sometimes requiring a full power cycle. Even when it did work switching between standby to on took about 3 seconds, which felt like an eternity compared to the phone.
Focal Lengths
One of the big differences between the Pixe3l and Samsung was the available focal length.
A bit of an admission here. I bought the Pixel 6A due to its ability to take long exposure images, only to find only the Pixel 6 had that ability (This was not which not well documented). This hurt for a while, but it was ameliorated somewhat by the wide camera mode. I really love the ultra wide focal length and 90% of my images are taken with it.
The Samsung focal length, although longer, is not as wide and for I found it hard to get all the scenes in with architectural shots. Nor can it do panoramas, which are really easy on the phone
The concert
While fun, Birmingham city center in bright sunlight was not going to test either camera greatly, therefore enough the the support act, to the main event.
The concert was to be held at Villa Park, a place despite my long years living in Birmingham, I had never visited.
As is my way, I arrived far too early, and wondered onto the pitch. It was only after an hour I realised I had somehow avoided the stewards and was in fact not meant to be on the pitch, since I did not have the correct tickets, as everyone else had arm bands on. I therefore had a dilemma. I could hide in the crowd and get a better view of the concert, or go and take my seat. The 20-year-old me would of probably taken the former option, but I was tired, older, and therefore sneaking past the stewards again (it was that easy) I took my seat.
I did try a few shots of the audience. I am not a very confident street/social photographer, and generally hide behind a long lens to try and remain unobtrusive. In some ways it is easier with a phone since no one bats an eyelid when people take phone images, while you are considered the anti-Christ if you try the same with a full camera. To be honest the form factor of the Samsung is close enough to be mistaken for a phone, however I took advantage of the long lens allowed me to pick out individuals from high in the stands
However the phones panorama mode allowed easy capture of the entire stadium
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| A Villa Panoroma |
Then at 7 O'Clock the concert started. Being summer it meant that the light was still good. The irony of modern concerts is that you pay a lot, then end up so far away from the stage that the act is a tiny figure, and you can only view them via the giant video screens. To be honest they might as well as been in Norway, but obviously we go for the shared experience.
I also still remember the day when you were frisked to make sure you bought no cameras in. Now everyone has a camera and spend their time using it to take images, recordings and selfies. So, would my Samsung super zoom trump these?
The short answer was yes. Although some of the images initially were under-exposed, probably due to the bright sky, the longer lens gave the ability to get shots, that would have been impossible with the Pixel.
If I had more of chance to play with the Samsung, I may have been better in getting the exposure better, such as switching to spot metering. It should also be noted that at least I had those options on the Samsung, while the Pixel provided virtually none. However, with both I missed a viewfinder and histogram display
However there were limits with the long zoom. The first is that with the phone form factor, it is really hard to hold steady. Also without a dedicated view finder, holding the camera at arms length and with full magnification, it was hard to frame the picture. This shows the limitations of such an extreme magnification on such a small body, making it pretty well useless for wildlife photography. Even when we did get a shot, the sensor limitations started to kick in, as shown below, where the image started to break apart at maximum magnification and much detail is lost.
So what about the Pixel? Well initially I thought the images were as good, if not better than the Samsung. Certainly they had better dynamic range capturing sky and crowd. However closer examination showed a certain artificiality to them, like they had been oversharpened
This got even worse when we tried to zoom in using the digital zoom.
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| A surrealist image |
The reason for this is that to compensate for the small lens, the Pixel uses so called "AI" to sharpen the images. Generally they look fine, until compared to cameras with bigger lenses etc. The shot above shows that whatever the hype, there are limits to this.
Video
For a longtime I was dismissive of video, but I have now started including it more into my work. It is difficult to show the differences on the blog, but I have put a video together with some of the photos and concert videos taken.
A longer youtube video compilation
My initial impression is that the Pixel out performs the Samsung in video. This is no a great surprise with the phone taking advantage of its greater processing power to support higher resolution modes.
Final Thoughts and conclusion?
When I started this, I assumed the Pixel phone would win hands down. After all the pixel phone camera has the benefit of 10 years of development, masses of processing power, and vastly improved sensor technology.
However, the results are far closer than I expected and even after a decade the Samsung galaxy camera still produces great images in the right situations.
So, let’s start with the good. Despite the promises and advertising, the Samsung camera shows there is no substitute for a good lens. Computational photography techniques continually promise to overcome the limitations of physics, and often they do a good job, so as adding bokeh in portraits, but they will only take you so far. It is only when you hold two images next to each other, you see the A.I generated one to be inferior.
Secondly the Samsung camera interface is superb. I wish there was a phone and to be honest some camera's which had a UI as half as impressive. It is clear, obvious and provides a great user experience. The problem with the general android experience is that it caters for the masses. Any attempt to fine tune your image is doomed by the lack on control of the camera hardware itself
Next the not so good. Although the Samsung camera offered 21x zoom, to be honest it was too long. Using such a long zoom on a small form factor is virtually unusable in both handling and results and would of preferred a wider focal length with a shorter zoom. Also, the camera did not offer some of the facilities we expect such a panorama mode and DNG raw.
Finally, then ugly. Standby to on times was slow and really needed a better on/off switch. For a device that depended on the screen for use, it was not bright enough in strong light.
The Samsung Camera phone cost a surprisingly low £500 in 2011 (~ £650 today). With high end mobiles $ 1000 and above, it still feels good value and surprisingly modern and capable. However, with a mobile phone camera, you are not only getting a capable camera, but a phone, social media access, wallet, maps etc.
This defines the problem and while such devices fell out of fashion. However capable it is, it still requires carrying two devices, when one will generally do OK. The Samsung camera is a great example of when being best sometimes does not beat being just good enough, which is a pity since phone manufacturers could learn a lot from it about making mobile phones more than snapping machines and actual devices that photographers can use.
Here are some other images taken during the day...
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