Having played with the Samsung GALAXY Camera at my local retail shops, I was quite sceptical about the Galaxy Camera, my first impression was not what anyone would want to hear if they were looking to buy one.  I read reviews and watched many videos but my scepticism just got the better of me, I still wanted to spend some time with it.
Samsung launched a competition for various cities to compete and show that their city was the most photogenic city and I expected London to win, seen as we have so many historical landmarks but never mind, I’d rather visit a different city and see something new.  The campaign called “Life’s a Photo, Take it” truly speaks for itself, some of the best pictures taken with the Samsung Galaxy Camera in all the cities involved can be found on the campaign’s Official Tumblr blog.
The Winning Shots for Berlin:
Performing a quick search on the photographers’ Instagram profile, you will see some impressive photos that you can easily mistake for a DSLR camera in action.  Thanks to Samsung who decided to take some bloggers to the winning city of Berlin over the weekend, I got to spend the day with the Galaxy Camera and I think the pictures taken with it myself whilst touring the city speaks for itself.  Those photos can be seen on my Instagram Profile or Tumblr.
The Camera is highly connected socially with ability to take  photo, share it via Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr or even upload them straight to Dropbox; not many cameras can do so.  In order to win over DSLR Camera users, the camera has various modes to suit their needs, you can set it to professional mode so you can manually set the aperture, shutter speed and many more options.
Apart from the connectivity, the build quality is also great with the weight equally distributed ; some of the button placement can be a little awkward like where the zoom toggle is, I sometimes ended up pushing it up and down without meaning to and the flash often gets pushed up when in my pocket, on the positive side, the screen is amazingly big, great for viewing the photos taken or even editing them using various apps or the photo editing app Samsung included.
Samsung Galaxy Camera Functions:
Packing Android Jelly bean, the software performed very well with little or no lag at all although when taking pictures and changing modes, there can be slight delay but for the average user, it is fine. Â One thing that was annoying is how the lenses extended whenever you go into Instagram and select the camera button, the camera seems to think you will automatically take pictures so when you switch between camera and browsing your gallery it extends and retracts so watch your hands.
If you are the type who finds the settings in DSLR Cameras difficult to get used to, then there is the Smart Mode where you can simply set the scene e.g. Action freeze, Landscape etc and the Camera does the rest for you, for me that is a winner, the option for me to take my time and do what I do with my DSLR and when life demands a quick photo I can switch to smart mode or better yet, use the Auto mode.
Recording video using the Galaxy Camera is also very impressive, the 21x Zoom performed beyond my expectation of a point to shoot camera, it recorded full 1080p HD movie at 30FPS and it can also used to take slow motion moves at 150FPS.
Sample:
Since this is not a review article, I will not get into all the technical details but just to appreciate the camera, and I hope that in the next generation of the Galaxy Camera, Samsung adds an option to change lenses, that would make it an even better camera than it already is.  The camera takes great pictures, allows sharing instantly, and just brings out the creativity in you.  Battery life was not so great so purchasing an extra battery would be advisable.
Massive thank you to the team at JAM who worked extremely hard to make sure we had a good experience of the Samsung GALAXY Camera.
Sample Images:
