Is The Latest Thing Always Better?
Samsung Galaxy S5 Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge
Back in March of this year I upgraded my phone to not quite the latest Flagship in Samsung’s S series of Galaxy mobile phones the Samsung Galaxy S8 which was being released this year, but last year’s S7 edge being as it was now much more affordable to have on contract.
My previous model the S5 (which I had a couple of years earlier on a 2 year contract) I have kept mainly to use it as a video camera, so I can use it with the new S7 edge and get 2 video camera angles for shooting my live videos I make every now and then of me singing along with my guitar to the odd song I post on YouTube every now and then.
To be honest I was thinking of selling my old S5 and getting a video camera. But to match anywhere near the HD video quality the S5 can give you, I would be looking at something between £300 to £500 which is something I could not really afford to spend.
There is no doubt the S7 edge looks a lot more pleasing to the eye with it’s sleek brushed metal alloy case and its much more sharper display curved edge screen. It also as a lot of other improvements over the S5 especially with its fingerprint scanner. But is its video camera any better than the S5 when it comes down to good HD quality one might ask?.
Well no doubt a lot of reviews will point out that the video camera and camera in the S7edge is better than the S5, even though it only has a 12 megapixel camera in relation to the 16 megapixels that is on the S5. This is because it uses what Samsung call Dual Pixels.
They also boast that the S7edge is much better in low light situations to which no doubt it is very good in those situations. But this is something also the S5 can quite easily handle just by pressing a button in the settings called “Low Light Detection” and simply turning it on. Both phones can also be used for 4K video too, though my solely purpose is for use with HD 1080p video quality and both phones can handle that very well.
But regarding the video cameras in both phones the S5 has something no other Samsung Galaxy actually has. This one thing is also something many people complained about when they released the S5 a good couple of years back now, and considered it as a stupid thing for them do regarding it’s design. That very thing was the placement of the built in condenser microphone.
The very fact that Samsung had placed the microphone on the back of the phone had people reeling simply because if you placed the phone on a desk and it rang, you could hardly hear the damn thing. Though for the use of a phone I admit myself that it was perhaps a bit of a stupid idea at the time.
But just recently I videoed my brother playing his guitar for a song I was doing, and it was the first time I decided to use the audio from both phones because I had a technical problem with my recording studio equipment at the time, so the only way to get the song done in time was just to use the phones for both the video and the audio. As a rule I only ever use the phones for recording the video footage only and use my more expensive microphones in my studio to record the audio in my DAW.
Upon trying this out for the first time. I soon discovered that placing the microphone on the back of the phone was the best thing Samsung could of ever done regarding using your phone as a video camera. Having it placed there meant you was getting a way better audio quality and making the S5 much better as a video camera for recording than the S7 edge.
So the latest thing is not necessarily all that better at all, and maybe Samsung need to go back to the drawing board and design their phones with two microphones. One for the front or side for using the phone, and one for the back for using the video camera.
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