Asus Zenfone Zoom Review: Smartphone That Can Redefine Photography

At a time when there are loads of smartphone options being made available for the consumers – it is becoming very difficult for brands to create the much needed differentiation – by announcing Zenfone Zoom - Asus has clearly made it easier to differentiate.  

Asus Zenfone Zoom is perhaps the only smartphone that comes with 3X optical lens that will make all the difference while taking professional grade pictures.

Stylish Feel

This smartphone has style written all over it. Especially the way its back is designed – with a leather finish it is giving a unique value and smooth grip to the users. This also helps while taking good pictures as one needs to have solid grip in order to take pictures – at times, even in difficult positions.

And Zoomify your life too…

Whether you are into taking close-ups or long shots, panorama or landscape pictures - Asus Zenfone Zoom can deliver a unique experience for you. While reviewing this smartphone, we have extensively used its photo features and found that it is giving a whole new meaning to photography. Especially, when you compare it with a DSLR, which is bulky and at times difficult to carry.

Even on the smartphone side, so far we have been used to Zoom without an optical lens backing the effort – as a result, zoom pictures are not clear. On the other hand, with Zenfone Zoom – it is a different story as it comes with a 3X optical lens.

[caption id="attachment_17786" align="alignnone" width="300"] The Taj Mahal taken by Zenfone Zoom[/caption]

When we take Zoomed pictures from other smartphone cameras – they can lead to hazy pictures. Usually, there is less color detail on such pictures. So for instance – while taking pictures of trees, it is quite usual that leaves merge into one another and turn into blobs on the tree branches. Fine details people in a distance, street lights etc simply vanish or have no color detail. Well, that’s not the case if you have Zenfone Zoom in your hand. While extensively reviewing it, we found that the zoomed images are always sharp and the colors are vibrant. The optical zoom lens in this smartphone has made a lot of difference and is also redefining the way smartphone photography is seen.

Also we found that the camera app that comes with Zenfone Zoom is certainly one of the finest that is available in any smartphone today. You can control every aspect of the camera – exposure value, ISO, white balance and of course the shutter speed, all that can work at your command.

Besides the spectacular camera – this Zenfone comes with an incredible 128 GB of ROM and 4 GB of RAM. The Power & Boost feature shuts off rarely used processes to save battery life and Power Saver offers presets that can add up to 50 hours of additional standby time to the battery of this smartphone. There’s also an app called – Splendid which can control the color output of the 1080p IPS display.

Final Verdict

Asus Zenfone Zoom is surely the best smartphone that can be used for getting professional photography results. The amazing optical zoom lens is giving a new direction to the smartphone photography. All in all, this is a great device to have, especially if you love photography.

SPECIFICATIONS - ASUS ZenFone Zoom

Processor

PC – Grade 64-bit Z3590 Intel Super Quad-core CPU 2.5Ghz

 Operating system

ASUS ZenUI under Android 5.0 (Lollipop)

Display

5.5-inch with 1920 x 1080 (Full HD) resolution and 403ppi pixel density

IPS display with 400cd/m2 brightness and full-screen lamination

Scratch-resistant Corning® Gorilla® Glass 4 with anti-fingerprint coating

PixelMaster cameras

Rear: 13MP, f/2.7 aperture, 10P HOYA lens, 3X optical zoom/12X total zoom, with 4 stop optical image stabilization (OIS), laser auto-focus and dual-color Real Tone flash

Front: 5MP, f/2.0-aperture, wide-angle 88-degree lens with Pano Selfie

Memory and storage

128GB ROM

LPDDR3 4GB RAM

Micro SD card slot (up to 128GB expandable)

 Wireless

802.11 a/b/g/n/ac, Wi-Fi Direct, Bluetooth® 4.0

Location sensors

GPS, A-GPS, GLONASS, QZSS,SBAS,BDS

Other sensors

Accelerometer, proximity, ambient light, gyro, digital compass and Hall-effect sensors

Battery

3000mAh non-removable lithium-polymer

Weight

185g

Price – INR 37,999