Melbourne-based Rhiannon Joyce is always shooting photos and videos for both her work as a marketing and partnerships director at Shameless Media and for her everyday life. She was super-excited to check out the new Samsung Galaxy S21 5G and the extensive range of camera features it offers. Here, she puts us in the picture with her review…
Stylish Design
What I like about the new Samsung is that the back of it isn’t glass, it’s polycarbonate, which is a type of plastic. So I’m not too concerned about dropping my phone and cracking it! I did opt for a cute colour; I chose the violet and I like that it’s got this frosted matt finish. It looks quite chic and expensive.
Impressive Photo and Video
The quality of the photos and the videos I took are unbelievable. It has a triple camera on the back of the phone and a feature called Director’s View that enables you to choose to record from multiple cameras. The footage from this is at a lower res of 1080 pixels but if you’re more obsessed with camera specs, it has selfie and rear cameras. And you can use this super-clever feature called Video Snap that gets high-quality [still] images from 8K video: record now, then snap later. It’s also got [Space Zoom], which allows you to zoom up to 30 times, and wide angle, ultra-wide angle and telephoto lenses. The processing feature for photos ensures quite a natural but super-polished result.
Single Take mode is really fun: it takes a 5- to 15-second video and curates a bunch of pictures for you. I love this feature because I prefer more candid shots when I snap for either my own personal content or the content I’m taking on behalf of work. Being able to select photos that are in motion definitely leans into my preferred style of content.
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The Specifications
The Samsung Galaxy S21 5G works off an Android 11 operating system, which is the most recent. It has amazing storage – as a content creator, that’s super-important for me – a total of 128GB of internal storage, 8GB of RAM, and with 5G connectivity, you know that the downloading is going to be superfast. Most importantly, the battery life is excellent, so I’m able to shoot content, post and review with no hassle.
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Other Nifty Features
In terms of my favourite feature that was more of a utility, it was definitely multitasking. I’m constantly jumping between apps, particularly throughout work when I am shooting content and then having to upload it to the drive. Being able to go between the two apps was supereasy with the multitasking feature.
The fingerprint scanner is large and super-responsive, [making] it safe and dependable but easy to get into your phone and apps. Plus there are a ton of other ways to customise the device just to suit you: you can add the widgets you use most often to the lock screen, so you can access these quickly and easily – for me, that’s my calendar, Google Drive, Instagram and Spotify – and enable pop-up windows, perfect for my busy life. Â
Verdict: All in all, I think the Samsung Galaxy S21 is well suited to people who are content creators and value taking high-quality images and videos. I love its strong battery life, the smart and easy-to-use Single Take feature [and], obviously, I love the design of the phone.
