I probably didn’t do as much homework as I should’ve.
I bought the Galaxy Camera as well the last time it was up for this price, mostly because of the great reviews (though, to be fair, there are definitely some negative ones out there I should’ve looked at beforehand too).
I’m still impressed with it as a gadget, but I haven’t found it to be as useful as I was hoping as a camera.
Essentially, I wanted a camera for three things:
1.) Shooting the sky (kind of want to collect cool sunsets, moonshots, and the like, to use as desktop wallpapers on a 1440p display.
2.) Shooting in dark/indoor/party type stuff, without any grain or fuzz.
3.) Capture some decent video in varying situations.
Ideally, said camera would do all of these in auto mode, or at least have a simple preset that can be selected quickly, so that when something catches my eye, I can just point-and-shoot.
I still don’t have the first idea what sort of a camera I should have for something like this. But after a few weeks of playing with it, I’m starting to think the Galaxy Camera isn’t it.
Perhaps I can squeeze a little more out of it if I learn how to use the manual mode settings, but I haven’t been able to get the shots I want using what appear to be the appropriate presets as yet. Almost every photo I take seems to come out softer/fuzzier than what I’m after.
It’s better than the camera in my Nexus 5, certainly (not for a panorama, though, surprisingly enough), but not by so much that it’s worth pulling out instead of the Nexus 5, which works much better as a post-processing/publishing/sharing device for two reasons:
1.) It has LTE connectivity, while this version of the Galaxy Camera requires Wi-Fi, or a tether to the phone for data connectivity.
2.) The hardware in the camera is way underpowered for running the OS they’ve crammed into it. On paper, it looks like it should all run just fine, if not quite so fast as something like a Nexus 5. In practice, however, it’s lag, lag, lag; unnoticed swipe/kypress; lag, lag, lag; odd inconsistencies with moving content between apps via the share button; lag, lag, lag; inconsistent behavior when trying to use non-stock camera apps to make up for some of the weaknesses of the stock one; and it really tends to lag a lot, at least as soon as you start doing something with it other than using it as a camera.
I’m still playing with it, though. It’s a fun gadget, and it always seems to make for a conversation piece whenever someone sees me using it. For what I spent on it, it was worth the gamble to see what it was like.