Whats a haircut got to do with a phone?
Last week while on a job site some lowlife broke into my vehicle and stole my Samsung S6 which I had been planning to buy off the company I work for. By pure serendipity I had been viewing phone models that same morning, with the intention of replacing my wife’s failing ACE 3 from Samsung. It had come down to two phones the slightly higher specced Galaxy J5 Pro or the more modest Galaxy J3 Pro.
To replace my S6 I went with the J3 Pro, as I didnt want to invest too much in what is essentially a “work” phone. I was concerned that the lower spec would show up in the performance area but I need not have been concerned. The speed of operation is almost as fast as the S6 and being newer than the S6 does seem to exhibit some faster performance in certain operations, not that the S6 was slow by any means. So I’m well pleased with all the essential tasks being performed very nicely. Bear in mind that while modest games can be played on this phone, for the bleeding edge stuff such as 4k video or high end gaming you would need to look elsewhere.
The phone comes equipped with a 5Mp front facing camera and a 13 Mp f1.9 rear camera. Sadly no image stabilisation, which could be a problem when shooting video ( not tested yet ) but seemed to be of little real issue when taking photos in part due to the fast f1.9 lens.
The camera did tend to hunt a little for focus on occasion but when you set the focus point you want it had no difficulty and for the most part didnt have an issue with focus in general. All of the images shown below are taken inside my favourite Hairdresser, The Barber Shop, Arawata Street, Te Awamutu. The internal lighting is Neon Tube and the camera had no issue with the white balance. I never changed any setting on the camera and shot straight out of the box, much as what most people would do with their phone.
The results were pretty good, images were sharp, colour balance is good and the focus was good with only a very small shutter release delay, certainly no worse than my S6 in this regard. One of the outstanding things I noted with this camera was its ability to shoot in these conditions at extremely low ISO with none of the images below being over ISO 80 and some as low as ISO 40. Thats an outstanding performance from a phone camera and bodes well for low light shooting which I will report back on once I have had more time to use this phone.
Note all images below are straight out of the camera with no post processing applied. I have tried a couple of edits for shadows on some of the darker images but there is not very much headroom in the files to recover shadows, so it will be a what you see is what you get type of output. I did note that the camera was set in HDR mode and it seems to be pretty good at retaining highlights but does seem to struggle with some of the denser shadow areas, but in general the output is certainly good enough for small/medium prints and for internet use. When viewed at full resolution you can see that the images dont hold up so well. I would be inclined to resize the images to a smaller format to maintain better image structure. Jpegs are easy to do this to moreso that some file types. I dont think I would print anything larger than A4, but that should still provide a decent print.
My thanks to the lovely lady who owns and operates this barbershop. I’m pretty sure she wasn’t expecting to be the centre of focus for one of my blog posts. For a relaxed haircut and a chat, I cant think of anyone more obliging ( or tolerant for allowing me to do this ).
As always click the images for a larger size.
