Samsung Galaxy A41 review

One basic camera trio

The Galaxy A41 has a triple-camera on the back with a rather familiar arrangement - a high-res primary shooter, an ultrawide snapper, and a 5MP depth sensor. A single LED flash is around as well, if you ever need it.

The primary camera uses a 48MP Sony IMX582 1/2.0" sensor with 0.8µm pixels, f/2.0 lens, and Quad Bayer color filter. The latter means this camera saves 12MP photos, though a high-res 48MP shooting mode is available as well. Phase-detect autofocus is supported.

The ultrawide camera uses an 8MP Samsung ISOCELL S5K4HAYX 1/4.0" sensor with 1.12µm pixels behind f/2.2 lens. The focus is fixed.

The depth camera uses a 5MP GC5035 sensor with f/2.4 aperture.

The selfie camera offers a 24.8MP 1/2.78" sensor with 0.9µm pixels and Quad-Bayer filter. Oddly, the sensor reading app reported that it is both Sony IMX 576 and Samsung S5K2X5. Either way, both sensors are of the same size and offer the same specs. The sensor sits behind an f/2.2 aperture lens that has a fixed focus. Being a Quad Bayer type of module, the selfie cam saves 12MP images by default, but this one can be set to output 16MP shots if that's necessary.

Like many other Samsung phones, the selfie on the A41 has a toggle to determine how wide the frame will be. This setting annoyingly defaults to the narrower option and hence - an 8MP crop, which is unfortunately also the norm with Samsung devices. When shooting in the wider aspect, selfies come out in 12MP.

The camera app is the same you'd find on every Samsung with a few minor design tweaks introduced with One UI 2.0 like the larger font for the modes and the outline for the selected mode as opposed to the solid bubble of before.

Functionally, it's mostly identical to any other camera app out there. Swiping left and right will switch between all available modes, and there's also an option to re-arrange or remove some of the modes from the viewfinder. Vertical swipes in either direction will switch between front and rear cameras.

The settings icon is located in the upper left corner of the screen and gives you fine control over the cameras. You don't get separate setting screens for photo and video, since the options aren't that many in total. The usual stuff like video resolution, grid lines, location data, etc., can be found there. You can also turn on and off the Scene optimizer. Once on, you still have to toggle it on a second time from the main UI though. Keep that in mind.

The Galaxy A41 camera does not support Night Mode.

Camera app

Image quality

The 12MP default photos from the main camera are average in detail, though areas of high complexity like foliage may even become a smudgy mess. Other than that, the images show excellent contrast, lively and mostly accurate color reproduction, and all traces of noise are gone.

The dynamic range is outstanding in most of the photos, thanks to the Auto HDR, which trigger when needed (read - most of the time).

Main camera, 12MP

You can turn the Auto HDR off, but we do not recommend doing it in hope of gaining more detail. The HDR does not smear fine detail but if you find the HDR effect unnatural (some will), then that maybe a good reason.

HDR on • HDR off • HDR on • HDR off

There is a high-res 48MP mode even though it is a bit hard to find - it's within the aspect settings. It does a great job - the 48MP images look very detailed, with great contrast and colors. They can't benefit from Auto HDR, so their dynamic range is not as great as on the default photos.

Main camera, 48MP

But can you get better 12MP shots from downsizing the 48MP ones? Short answer - yes.

If you want to get more detailed image, and one that's not as sharpened, shooting in 48MP and then manually downsizing to 12MP is the way. Is it worth the hassle? Well, the extra detail is artificially created by the algorithm and you may notice some artefacts in the foliage. And even then, when the added detail is an illusion, it is still a good illusion, but we will leave that for you to decide.

Main camera • 48MP-to-12MP • Main camera • 48MP-to-12MP

The 8MP stills from the ultrawide camera are even poorer in detail, but also excel in dynamic range, contrast, and colors. The Auto HDR surely helped a lot.

Ultrawide camera, 8MP

The 5MP depth sensor comes in handy when shooting portraits. The 12MP portraits taken with the main camera are excellent - the detail is abundant, the contrast is great, and the subject separation is proficient enough for this class. The artificial blur looks good, too.

Portraits, 12MP

The 12MP low-light photos from the main camera are pretty good considering the A41 price. They have enough detail and good contrast, and while the colors are a bit off, they are still very much usable.

The sunset scenes are great. The ones taken at night are okay, a bit smudged by the noise-reduction algorithm, but still.

Main camera, 12MP

Same goes for the ultrawide night photos. The sunset ones are more than we expected from this budget class, while the night shots are usable even if the noise spikes and the captured detail goes down the drain.

Ultrawide camera, 8MP

Unfortunately, there is no Night Mode available on the Galaxy A41.

We also shot our usual posters with the Galaxy A41. Here's how it stack-up against the competition. Feel free to browse around and pit it against other phones from our extensive database.

Samsung Galaxy A41 against the Xiaomi Redmi Note 9S and the Samsung Galaxy A31 in our Photo compare tool

Selfies

AS we mentioned, depending in the view mode, the camera will either give you a 12MP shots, or an 8MP crop from the said shot. We captured all selfies in the native 12MP mode even it was not the default one.

The 12MP selfies may not be rich in detail, but they excel in everything else - contrast, colors, dynamic range. We did like the snaps we got from the A41 selfies shooter, but it is good to know that when the light is not ideal, the resolved detail deteriorates dramatically.

12MP selfies

Portraits are possible with the selfie camera and they are okay - the subject separation isn't perfect but the algorithm masks this with blur and the results are acceptable.

12MP selfies portraits

Video recording

The Samsung Galaxy A41 is not that capable as a video camera. Even though it theoretically has the resolution to pull-off 4K capture, the DSP inside the Helio P65 can't. The A41 is capped at 1080p and 30fps.

The 1080p videos from both the main and ultrawide cameras are encoded with an AVC video stream at 17 Mb/s and two-channel, 256 kB/s 48 kHz AAC audio, inside an mp4 container. The Galaxy A41 does allow you to use HEVC (h.265) instead, if you are after some space-saving, at the potential expense of a bit of quality.

There is no support for electronic stabilization on either snappers.

The main camera captured very good 1080p videos with accurate colors, wide dynamic range, and excellent contrast. The resolved detail turned out pretty good, too.

The clips coming from the ultrawide shooter are not as detailed as the samples from the main camera and the colors are somewhat over-saturated. They quality is okay, but definitely not as good as the main camera's.

Finally, closing this camera section off, here is the Galaxy A41 in our video comparison database.

Samsung Galaxy A41 against the Galaxy A31 and the Galaxy A40 in our Video compare tool