The Samsung Galaxy S4's Camera: What You Need to Know

Samsung's Galaxy S4 announcement is making waves all over the Internet. One of the phone's major upgrades is the new 13-megapixel camera. While a lot of folks have D-SLRs or nice point-and-shoot cameras at home, only a dedicated few carry one around at all times. For the rest of the world, the camera in your phone is the one that you'll always have available to capture random, unexpected moments.

The jump from 8 to 13 megapixels is a big one, and, like our own Sascha Segan, I am dubious if it will be an improvement. Jamming more pixels onto an already tiny image sensor is likely to do more harm than good when shooting in low light—and unless you're outdoors when the sun is up, you are likely in low light. An image sensor that is physically larger, like the one in the Nokia 808 PureView will do more to improve the quality of images.

The rest of the changes in the camera are software related, and some of them sound pretty neat. There's a Sound Shot mode that lets you record some audio to go along with your image. You can use this to take a note about the photo, or to simply capture some ambient noise from your environment to add to the atmosphere. This is something that will be especially popular at concerts.

The Dual Camera mode lets you record stills or video with both the front and rear cameras simultaneously. How you arrange the dual images or video streams is up to you—split-screen is an option, as is a picture-in-picture type effect. You can even put a postage stamp or heart-shaped border around the inlaid image.

Drama Shot mode rattles off a burst of 100 images in 4 seconds—that's 25 frames per second if you care to do the math. The phone then takes these shots and merges them into what Samsung is calling a moving collage. It's a single image that shows the movement of your subject through the frame—it should be popular when capturing images of your children playing sports or activities like figure skating.

If you're tired of taking photos and having folks in the background distract you, Eraser is a feature that you'll appreciate. The small sensor in a phone can't blur the background like a shot from a D-SLR, and if you're trying to take a photo in front of a famous landmark there are likely to be passersby distracting from the shot. Eraser grabs five shots in quick succession and gets rid of objects that aren't in every frame. Photoshop has been able to do this for some time, but this should prove to be much easier.

The final new photo feature is more of an organization tool than anything else. Story Shot is the antithesis of the iPhone's Photo Stream. Instead of just showing all of your photos in the order in which they were taken without any sort of capsulation, Story Shot organizes your pictures based on the timestamp and the surrounding environment. This is pretty similar to the Events feature found in Apple's iPhoto software. This way, the photos from that awesome Justin Bieber concert won't be mixed up with those from your cousin's Bat Mitzvah.

Galaxy S III owners may be getting some of these features via a software update. But Samsung wasn't clear on which ones would come to older phones, only that features that weren't dependent on hardware would make their way to older models. If I had to guess, I'd be surprised to see Drama Shot and the Dual Camera functions on the older phones; they'd likely put too much tax on its older CPU—but I won't be surprised to see Sound Shot, Story Shot, and Eraser come to the S III.

For more, check out PCMag's hands on with the Galaxy S4 and the slideshow above.