Samsung Galaxy K Zoom

Available now 
29th April 2014

Samsung's approach to high-end camera phones is rather different from the competition with a series of devices that are essentially hybrids of digital cameras and smartphones. The new Samsung Galaxy K Zoom continues this trend with a powerful Android device combined with a 20 megapixel snapper with a big zoom lens.

We won't linger too long on the phone side, except to say that this is an Android 4.4 device with a 4.8" 720 x 1280 pixel display, 2 megapixel front-facing camera, a hexa-core processor (1.3GHz quad-core plus 1.7GHz dual-core) with 2GB of RAM, 8GB of onboard storage plus a microSD slot, LTE, NFC plus all the usual smartphone features.

Of course on this device it is the camera that is the star - this is a 20.7 megapixel unit with optical image stabilisation and a 10x optical zoom plus a Xenon flash. The lens does make the Galaxy K Zoom quite a thick device, coming in at 20.2mm with the lens closed and around 53mm when the lens is fully extended. It's a heavy device too, coming in at 200 grams which is substantially heavier than the Nokia Lumia 1020 which has a higher megapixel count but lacks optical zoom.

The camera includes the usual range of Samsung software enhancements plus a guided "selfie" mode and several advanced picture settings. Despite being quite a bit larger than the Galaxy S4 Zoom, the Galaxy K Zoom is a little lighter and it certainly has a better specification set.

Inside it all is a 2430 mAh battery which doesn't seem particularly large when you consider the Xenon flash and the energy needed to move that big lens about, and it's actually smaller than on the Samsung Galaxy S5.

Samsung didn't give any guidance on price or availability, but we think that you won't have long to wait and we guess that the retail price will be about €500 or so.