Samsung launches a ‘selfie-friendly’ smartphone

I once stumbled upon a meme that said, “It’s not the camera, it’s your face” written in imposing Impact over a photo of a woman making a duck face, an expression that has long brought shame to actual ducks. Selfies are tricky things. If you’re going to take one, you have to do it right. Find the right light, the right angle, the right background, and then the tricky part — position your camera while making whatever face you want to make and press “capture” while holding the device steady. Sometimes you get it right away, sometimes the first try results in an unpostable wacky face. At the risk of sounding defensive here, I say sometimes it is the camera. Use a digicam and your face gets distorted, like a sideways football. Use the front camera of your phone and you get an unsatisfying composite of grain and blur. Use the back and you get, well, sometimes just half your face. There are faces, of course, that photograph nicely no matter what — and then there’s the rest of us, what magazines call “real people,” who have to make an effort to get it right.

The selfie, it seems, is more than just another one of those fads that won’t go away, that is, as far as its modern definition goes — a self-portrait taken with a camera. The difficulty of taking one has been eased by technology, first with the release of tiny digital cameras, second with the improvement of these cameras with the inclusion of anti-shake features, smile detection and scene selection features, third, with the addition of some useful extras such as editing capabilities in the form of filters, and fourth, with the application of all these once camera-specific features onto a handheld device that we would not mind carrying around anywhere: the smartphone.

Recently at Singapore’s Red Dot Museum, Samsung made the power of the selfie official when it launched the first selfie-friendly camera-specialized smartphone called the Galaxy K Zoom. Business in the front and party in the back, the K Zoom has a retracting lens — nine different lenses inside in total, with three that retract to the side when at rest so the phone is still slim at 20.2mm and 200 grams even with the lens. Eugene Goh, vice president of IT and mobile for Samsung Electronics Singapore pointed out: “The smartphone can be used as a primary camera, and you can pocket it even when you’re wearing a pair of skinny jeans.” This made the audience of tech and lifestyle writers chuckle — relate much? Yes.

 â€œWe are doing our best to deliver new technology and products to make people’s lives better. I strongly believe it will help people express their emotions wisely and connect to the world more seamlessly,” said Sun Hong Lim, senior vice president of Samsung’s imaging business. He enumerated exactly how the smartphone will do this by going over its specs: a high-performance smartphone with a camera that has 10x optical zoom, real optics, 60fps full-HD, 20.7-megapixel BSI CMOS sensor, and a built-in Xenon flash, which is brighter and travels much farther than an LED flash generally used in camera phones.

The smartphone itself is LTE-enabled with a hexa-core processor that guarantees full efficiency with heterogenous multi-processing (HMP) technology, the ultra power-saving mode that many have raved about in the Samsung Galaxy S5 (it shuts down most non-essential functions to prolong battery life), a Kids Mode that protects all your data when your K Zoom is held by a child (or a really clumsy adult), 2GB of RAM and up to one terabyte of cloud storage. Some more of the Galaxy K Zoom’s cool features:

KEEP CALM AND SELFIE ON

The Selfie Alarm is one of the Galaxy K Zoom’s most interesting functions. It knows. No really, it does. Short of something straight out of a sci-fi comedy, the smartphone’s back camera can tell if you’re trying to take a selfie. All one has to do is assume the selfie position (angle the back camera towards you) and wait for it to detect your face and the beeping sound, which means it is about to take your photo — three consecutive ones. No need to press the capture button, so you can concentrate on the face you’re trying to make. Holding the device steady shouldn’t be to difficult either with its curved backside, which allows for a solid, stable grip, and real optical image stabilization, which adjusts to the way your hands are shaking so you have a real chance at a clear, sharp shot. With 36 percent of smartphone users posting at least five photos per week to social media, the Selfie Alarm seems like one attractive selling point for a camera-specialized phone.

DON’T CALL THEM FILTERS

The K Zoom’s Pro-Suggest feature would appeal to those who like to add a bit of drama to their shots, but it’s not an editing feature, so the presets are not filters. They are “films.” The device gives you a live preview of your selected film (it has 62 of them preloaded, all highly-customized for the K Zoom), so you can choose and shoot easily. It still has editing features, though, for those who would like to DIY, as well as preset scenes.

FIND YOUR BEST LIGHT

Studies show that photos with high lightness get more likes than dark, moody shots. Another marketing study suggests that photos with high levels of texture are more popular, as are those with a subject in focus versus a slightly blurred background. With a traditional camera, this can be achieved by adjusting focus and exposure — a function not available in most smartphones (unless you download the VSCO Cam app, which lets you adjust focus and exposure manually so you can control exactly how much light your frame gets). The K Zoom has a similar function built in, the auto focus/auto exposure separation feature. Just touch the screen to pinpoint focus and it adjusts light accordingly.

GETTING PERSONAL

Capturing personal lifestyle moments is not easy — this includes taking photos of your kid, your pet, a grammatically butchered road sign during your commute, fireworks, or a friend doing something she will regret (for leverage). However another study shared on Mashable shows that your social media friends are more likely to like a personal photo. Pets, kids, breakfast, nails and your face. Especially your face. Remember that epic Oscars selfie taken by Bradley Cooper and posted by Ellen DeGeneres (with a Samsung Galaxy Note 3!)? It wasn’t hashtagged #bestphotoever for nothing. Aside from the fact that everyone is in it — it has faces, it shows a human side to the actors and social media followers love that. The K Zoom’s object tracking function and Selfie Alarm should make taking group photos like the Oscars selfie easier. Every weird face every one of your weird friends make will be captured — in threes.

I would call selfies a phenomenon but with technology hot on the heels of the practice, something tells me we’ll just have to make a duck face and bear with it. Besides, we live in the selfie capital of the world! There’s no point in fighting it, especially when it’s as easy as point-and-shoot.

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The Samsung Galaxy K Zoom will be available in the Philippines this month. For information, visit www.samsung.com.ph.