Samsung Galaxy M21 is the latest smartphone announced by Samsung under the M series in India. The M21 was announced in March 2020 and it comes with triple rear camera which includes a 48MP sensor. It also has a 20MP selfie camera and is priced starting Rs 12,999 in India. So lets dive deep into the camera to see how it performs, here is the detailed Samsung Galaxy M21 Camera Review.
Camera Hardware:
In terms of camera hardware, it sports a quad rear camera with 48MP primary Camera with F/2.0. Samsung has not mentioned the sensor details, so we expect it to be either GM1 or GM2. You also get an 8MP Ultra Wide-angle Lens and 5MP depth sensor There is also LED flash included.
The front camera is an 20MP camera with a f/2.2 aperture. So lets find out how the camera performs.
Video Quality:
The phone can shoot 4K videos in 30fps and the quality looks quite good. It has good colors and video is crisp with details, but unfortunately there is no EIS available for 4K and hence you will have to depend more on 1080p at 30fps with EIS. Another major issue with most of the Samsung mid range phones is the focus hunting in videos which is evident here.
Moving to 1080p, here again the video colors are good and there is decent sharpness levels. But the video bitrate isn’t good and on top of this the phones has horrible focus hunting issues. This is definitely not a phone for video shooting. The stabilization is also very good and you get a stabilized footage.
The phone also packs an 8MP ultra wide angle camera and the video quality is quite average. The sharpness levels are average while the colors are vivid, the contrast seems to be messed up a bit. But you do get EIS for the 1080p resolution ultra wide angle camera.
The phone also can record slow motion videos in 240fps.
Photo Quality:
Moving to the photos,the daylight shots taken with the 48MP camera came out well. The colors are vivid and the sharpness levels are quite ok, although we feel there is still a room for improvement. This is the first time we are seeing good quality photos from a budget Samsung phone. The phone also has the tendency to saturate a bit especially in sky colors and greenery. There is auto HDR mode available and the dynamic range is very good and it resolves shadows very well. But overall we are quite happy with what Samsung has offered here.
The 8MP ultra wide angle shots came out pretty decent. While it is not as good as primary camera, it is still usable. If you look at the regular shots and ultra wide angle shots, you can see that colors are a bit too artificial on ultra wide angle lens.
The close up shots taken with the camera was good and it had good details, great sharpness and good color reproduction.
Moving to portrait shots, we felt that portraits are quite good. You can bright looking portraits with vivid colors and edge detection is also quite good. The skin tones are good and the sharpness levels are also acceptable.
Next moving to low light captures. The f/2.0 aperture on the primary camera doesn’t help much and extreme low light pictures are too noisy and blurry. In such situations, it is btter to take pictures with night mode. While the night mode takes some good photos with details and sharpness levels, it does take a bit of time to save the image. Also at times there is a bit of aggressive sharpening happening to reduce noise.
The indoor shots taken with the phone came out pretty good with adequate artificial light.
Moving to selfie camera, the 20MP shooter can shoot some really good selfies with excellent details, sharpness and colors. The dynamic range is also very good. The skin tones are good and so is the sharpness. We turned off the beauty mode since we like selfies without beauty. Since selfies are more of personal choice you can judge based on the clarity. The phone also comes with portrait mode and here it was pretty bad with poor edge detection.
Verdict:
So summing up, how good is the Samsung Galaxy M21 in terms of camera? The Samsung Galaxy M21 does well in daylight shots, close up and even selfie camera and it is surprisingly good. But at the same it fails in the video quality with horrible focus hunting issues and also average low light performance. The portrait selfie camera also needs improvement for poor edge detection.
