Galaxy S4 Camera Tragedy

[Meredith Vallee]

Everyone has been ooing and aahing over the S4 Camera. While I was initially inclined to agree I have since hit a dead end with this phone, which I personally find to be glitch prone and tedious. Even as I'm typing this the screen is freaking out, zooming in and out on its own, changing colors, etc. this post has already been deleted twice by the phone wanting to switch web pages and the voice to text leaves much to be desired.

Anyway, the camera. I had an Evo prior and it took surprisingly great pics. I have a photo of Darius Rucker that looks like professional quality. In a similar situation, I went to a Brett Michaels concert last night (don't tease) and was excited for how great I thought these pictures would be. Wrong. even though the photo looks great on the screen, when I snapped a picture it came out blurry and foggy. I change the settings tonight, and sport, then best pic, I tried everything and nothing helped. I wanted to just cry. Am I doing something wrong?

 

[SpookDroid]

First of all, take your phone for Warranty replacement. If the screen shows weird colors and acts up on its own, there's something wrong with your phone. Second, the S4 DOES take great pictures (don't take my word for it, go see for yourself in the gallery here). However, it doesn't always do it if you're in Auto Mode. For a concert I've found that the best pictures are taken when Night Mode is activated, but if there's too much movement around the stage or if you don't really have a steady hand, the general pictures look good but not sharp. Sports Mode will yield better results in avoiding motion blur but the light it lets in is too little for dark environments (which might also lead to an inability to focus properly), but with the bright lights of a concert sometimes this is the way to go to have the dark background just not in your picture but the bright stage looks better and not too bright and washed. I still think that a killer feature of any camera would be a "Concert Mode" that works. THAT I would buy.

 

[Meredith Vallee]

I used both of those modes and neither worked. I even did best face, worked with the anti-shake setting, to no avail. There are, of course, instances where the camera has taken impressive pics for a phone but overall I haven't been impressed.

I did bring the phone in and they shook their heads and said it was fine. When I picked up my phone this morning it had a "damaged SD card" warning (I baby this thing so I didn't do anything wrong) and it deleted all of my data. All my pics off my old phone, gone. Numbers, gone. My fault for not doing a cloud back up or something sooner? Yes. But upsetting never-the-less? Yup.