Infinix Zero 40 5G hands-on review

Camera

The Zero 40 5G has a triple camera system on the back consisting of a 108MP main camera and 50MP ultra-wide. The third lens is a 2MP depth sensor. The phone also has an interesting dual-flash design, which includes a standard and telephoto flash. The standard flash works as you'd expect while the telephoto flash has a narrower but longer throw, which is much more useful when you are zooming in.

The camera app is fairly straightforward and quite typical in terms of design and features. There is a link to open the GoPro app from here, which then lets you remotely monitor your GoPro cameras but the app is nothing special and you can easily download it on any other phone.

Starting with the image quality from the main camera, the Zero 40 5G performs well for the most part. There is a good amount of detail in the images with reasonably wide dynamic range and low noise. However, the issue is with the often aggressive color saturation, which can look quite garish at times. It's also inconsistent, so while some images can look very saturated, others not so much. Depending upon your tastes, you may or may not like this approach but it would have been nice to have an option to turn it down.

Main camera

A great feature of this sensor is being able to capture lossless 3x digitally zoomed shots. These often look quite impressive, and would be indistinguishable from a native 3x camera for a lot of users. The zoomed images are also relatively subdued compared to the standard wide shots with far less oversaturation.

3x lossless digital zoom

The phone also offers a native 108MP option. Like with the Redmi 13 5G, this option sometimes produced real native 108MP images and other times upscaled 12MP images. It seems to be a weird quirk of this sensor, which is shared by both phones, and it's not clear why it chooses to do this.

108MP main camera

The 50MP ultrawide has much of the same image processing as the main camera, which once again results in some oversaturated colors, although not quite to the same extent. The dynamic range here is worse but overall the images are quite good.

Ultrawide camera

Since the phone also uses the ultrawide with autofocus as a macro camera, the Zero 40 5G is capable of producing some decent results here. Photos captured using the dedicated macro mode don't have the best colors but they are quite detailed.

Macro images

Infinix makes quite a big deal about the video capabilities of the Zero 40 5G, even going as far as calling it the segment's first 4K 60FPS camera. That's not quite true, since the OnePlus Nord 4 costs the same and has 4K 60FPS. However, what the Zero 40 5G can do that the Nord 4 cannot is also capture 4K 60FPS video from its ultrawide and front cameras.

Starting with the 4K 30FPS video first, the quality is decent but has some issues. The level of detail is good but the dynamic range isn't great and there is noticeable purple fringing around edges. However, the bigger issue is that the autofocus keeps hunting as soon as you start moving, which causes a noticeable jitter in the image.

Moving on to the 4K 60FPS recording, you immediately notice the camera shake due to a lack of electronic image stabilization. The camera is now relying on just the optical stabilization, which isn't perfect and also causes a noticeable wobble that electronic stabilization does not have. However, since there is no EIS there is also no EIS crop, so you get a much wider field of view even on the main camera.

Moving on to the ultrawide we have the exact same issues. It's cool that you have 4K 60FPS available here but the lack of EIS at this resolution and frame rate again makes the image rather unusable. Not to mention, the ultrawide colors also aren't great in video.

Conclusion

The Infinix Zero 40 5G is a competent and well-made device, especially for the price. You get a good design and build quality, great display, good performance, fast charging, and a decent software experience. Other things like camera, battery life, and speakers are fine, if not spectacular. The video recording is a bit underwhelming, despite being the main focus of the device, and the software design lacks originality, but aside from that there isn't much to complain about.