Samsung’s new mid-priced phone features 4 rear cameras

Samsung Electronics Co. on Thursday unveiled its new Galaxy A9 smartphone, which the company says is the first smartphone in the world to include four rear cameras.

Samsung Electronics President Koh Dong-jin, who heads the company's mobile business, said that the new Galaxy A series featuring four rear cameras and intelligent functions targets a new “visual communication” generation of consumers who tend to communicate through images they shoot.

The rear side of the new Galaxy A9 features four cameras – each with a basic 2.4 million pixel lens, a telephoto lens, an ultra-wide-angle lens, and a depth-of-field lens. The telephoto lens supporting 2x optical zoom can capture clear and detailed images of an object at a long distance. The ultra-wide-angle lens on the 8 million pixel camera allows the user to capture images as they see them, as it features a 120-degree angle of view, which is similar to that of humans.

According to the Korean tech giant, the A9 allows more of the scene to be included in the photograph than other models and is more useful for group photos. The depth-of-field lens on a 5 million pixel camera provides a “live focus,” which the company says lets users to apply and adjust a depth-of-field effect before and after snapping a photo for a clearer expression‎ of a particular object or a blurrier presentation of the background.

In addition, the Galaxy A9 is mounted with the artificial intelligence-based “intelligent camera,” which was first introduced on the Galaxy Note 9, letting the camera take photos with optimal colors by automatically recognizing the photo types such as portrait, landscape and food without the user having to manually change picture modes or apply filters.

Industry insiders view Samsung’s introduction of latest technological features on the mid-priced Galaxy A series as its attempt to take greater shares in the emerging markets such as India and Southeast Asian countries. At an event in New York in August for unveiling the Galaxy Note 9, Koh expressed his commitment to recovering the company’s lost market shares by expanding the application of new technologies available on flagship smartphones to mid-priced products.


Ji-Hyun Kim jhk85@donga.com