Camera not as focused as it appears

[tnt4]

I'm trying to figure this out. The S7 can take some great pictures. But if I don't tap on the area I want focused, it does a generally poor job of focusing on anything in the photo. It's not apparent unless you zoom in a little bit, so the photos aren't looking blurry at first glance. But if you have to crop at all it's apparent. This is the 3rd S7 I've had (first two were Verizon, this one is the G930F) and they've all been the same.

For example... a messy spot on my desk in mediocre light with the S7 and 6S:
S7:

6S:

And now a crop of each which shows what I'm talking about...

S7:

6S:

This isn't the most drastic example I've seen, but you can clearly see a difference that wasn't as apparent in the full size photo. It's like the S7 doesn't really focus on anything in the photo if you don't tell it to - which makes me wonder if it has something to do with the new AF technology it's using. Or maybe the noise reduction is so overly strong, it's causing the problem.

I'm just not completely sold that this camera is as good as it's touted to be. So far my 6S and S6 both compete and beat it in almost every scenario I've tried. Even the low light photos look so muddy on the S7, I almost prefer the darker/noiser/sharper 6S images (the S6 loses to both in real low light).

 

[Alanhd]

In general a wider aperture like the S7 has will give you a shallower depth of field, so you have to pay more attention to the focal point, especially in lower light conditions.

 

[tnt4]

In general a wider aperture like the S7 has will give you a shallower depth of field, so you have to pay more attention to the focal point, especially in lower light conditions.

That's good to know, I was not aware of that. It seems the S7 has trouble "assuming" what the focal point should be in a lot of them.

 

[Alanhd]

That's good to know, I was not aware of that. It seems the S7 has trouble "assuming" what the focal point should be in a lot of them.

For a camera phone it is an amazing camera, but like in the photo you posted how does the camera know which bit exactly you want it to focus on, if it detected a face this would be the first area of focus.
As a comparison with my DLSR if I have the lens wide open I can get situations where I can have a persons nose in focus but the eyes are not in focus, the depth of field can be that shallow.
The camera tries it's best but under low light conditions it will open the aperture before it ramps up the ISO so this will compound the problem.

I would recommend doing a couple of test shots in pro mode using manual focus just to test the camera quality. If you had something like toy cars in a line and focus on the centre one, then you would get a sense of the depth of field.

 

[tnt4]

For a camera phone it is an amazing camera, but like in the photo you posted how does the camera know which bit exactly you want it to focus on, if it detected a face this would be the first area of focus.
As a comparison with my DLSR if I have the lens wide open I can get situations where I can have a persons nose in focus but the eyes are not in focus, the depth of field can be that shallow.
The camera tries it's best but under low light conditions it will open the aperture before it ramps up the ISO so this will compound the problem.

I would recommend doing a couple of test shots in pro mode using manual focus just to test the camera quality. If you had something like toy cars in a line and focus on the center one, then you would get a sense of the depth of field.

I didn't do the manual test b/c I never use that mode and don't want to have to do that. I can tell the camera quality is excellent when it does focus correctly.

But my experience with this has been extremely mixed. If it's a completely blank slate in the background, the S7 seems to know what to do and does it well. Or if it's blatantly obvious that the focused object is up close and everything else is far in the background, it can figure that out (faces or not). But if it's not either of those scenarios, it's almost like it guesses and gets it wrong 50% of the time, which isn't a big deal unless you plan to crop the picture even a little bit.

It's nitpicky, I know that. But to be honest I'd rather have the simplicity of a camera (on my phone) that doesn't require as much attention to the focal point of the picture to get it right - especially with the extreme processing done in low to medium light (which muddies things up a bit anyway).