Galaxy A7 2018: Click click click

It may come out of a run-of-the-mill box, but the Galaxy A7 (2018) is about as pretty as Samsung’s most expensive flagship phones. One look at the glass back that looks like spun silk and anyone would think it was on par with, say, the Note 9.

But in fact, the A7 is a mid-range phone and would otherwise have been ‘regular’ were it not for a distinctive feature up its sleeve. The A7 has three cameras, or lenses rather, and obviously they talk directly to those who absolutely love shooting creative photos on their smartphones.

On the back, to the extreme left, you would immediately notice the extra-long vertical line-up of camera lenses. Nothing else breaks the sheen on the back except a sedate rendition of the Samsung and Duos logos in the middle. The phone is available in blue, black and gold and we happened to see the blue version for our review.

Looks and performance

The lens line-up sticks out just a little but if you use a case — highly recommended and included in the box — it’s not likely to get damaged by placing on a flat surface. The A7 is reasonably light and slim and narrow enough to hold. There are no hard edges to dig into your palm. It’s all glass so some care is advised. Though the glass takes on finger smudges, they aren’t as visible as on some other phones.

The way the A7 wakes and unlocks is also distinctive from most phones. The fingerprint sensor is built into the power button on the side. It takes getting used to but I found it super fast and efficient.

Not once has it shut me out of the phone and I really liked the way the wake and unlock are one swift action. The only thing is that the power button and volume buttons shouldn’t have been on the same side — they’re all so subtle that you have to feel around for them a bit.

Once the A7 is turned on, you encounter one of Samsung’s nice, bright displays, a six-inch True FHD+ SuperAMOLED Infinity display — without a notch. The bezels are slim enough in my opinion, and Samsung has held out on the notch, which is rather nice as at least there’s one company’s phones you can head for if you hate those notches. The display is, as always for Samsung phones, great.

But to get straight to those three cameras and why a phone should need them at all...

Three is company?

One of the three lenses, the 24 MP (f/1.7), enables low light photography. Shooting in a room that had a single medium bright lamp on and moving to the darker corners, I found that the A7 definitely fills up the image with light. At the same time, it needs more sharpness and detail.

The 5 MP (f/2.2) lens provides depth for the Live Focus mode, called Portrait by everyone else. Now this one depends on being in good light and taking care that the subject in the foreground contrasts well with the background that has to be blurred. Care also has to be taken not to push the blur slider to maximum because that leads to artificial-looking photos and the edges of the subject also getting blurred in the bargain.

But pick the ideal conditions and this feature works quite as well as in most flagship phones.

The 8 MP (f/2.4) wide angle lens is by far the most fun part of the camera and in fact the smartphone itself. Rotate the device into landscape and go fullscreen. Click the on-screen switching to wide angle and see the screen fill up with so much more of the scene in front. There’s the inevitable group selfies, which will fit in everyone of course, but landscapes look wonderful and expansive.

Where the normal view is 78 degrees, the wide angle is 120 degrees of view. This is the feature that will make you want to take this specific phone along for a holiday.

But the 24 MP (f/2.0) front camera does a whole lot of brightening and whitening, even with beauty features turned off. If it encounters a bit of light, it tends to overexpose and wash out the image. But there are ideal conditions even for this camera and there’s the wide-angle mode here too, making for some creative photos selfies, especially outdoors.

Everything else about the phone is regular Samsung, really. It performs well with its octa-core Exynos processor and 4 GB (64 GB) or 6 GB RAM (128 GB). It has expandable memory. But it’s still working on Android 8.0 while new phones have moved on to Android 9 Pie and Samsung is notoriously late with its updates.

The A7 has a 3,200 mAh battery that performs pretty well as expected, which is rather good.

Price: ₹22,990 (online)

Pros: Beautiful looking, enjoyable wide angle photography, good display

Cons: No USB Type C, no fast charging, not on newest Android version, no notification light, all colours not available everywhere

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