Samsung Galaxy Ace 2 I8160 preview: First look

Very good 5MP camera

The Samsung Galaxy Ace 2 comes with a 5MP camera and a single LED flash. It captures photos at a maximum resolution of 2560 x 1920 pixels. There's a front VGA camera for video calling too.

The camera interface is the same as on previous Galaxy devices with two shortcut bars on each side of the viewfinder. On the right you get the still camera / camcorder switch, a virtual shutter key and the gallery shortcut.

On the left there's the front-back camera toggle, the flash options and the Settings shortcut. You can add a total of four shortcuts above the Settings shortcut - any four you like in any order.

Camera interface

The Galaxy Ace 2 has rich camera functionality - touch focus, scenes, geotagging, panoramas, smile and blink detection, effects and manual settings for things like ISO, exposure compensation and so on.

The old Galaxy Ace had a pretty impressive camera for its position in the lineup and the Ace 2 follows suit. The photos have an excellent amount of detail, they have very little noise, the exposure and white balance are spot on and the colors look good (with the usual dose of oversaturation).

Samsung Galaxy Ace 2 camera samples

720p video recording

The Samsung Galaxy Ace 2 can capture 720p videos at 30 fps with its main camera and VGA videos with the secondary camera. The camcorder uses the exact same interface as the still camera. You can use effects in the videos, but there's no touch focus.

The camcorder interface is identical to the still camera one

Videos are recorded into MP4 files with a bitrate of 12Mbps, which is pretty good for 720p resolution. The accompanying sound uses the AAC audio codec, but is mono only (64 Kbps bitrate, 44.1 kHz sampling rate).

The framerate hits the 30 fps target easily and videos are very smooth. The actual video resolution isn't outstanding - things look rather pixilated - but the rest seems to be quite OK.

Here's a video sample shot with the Galaxy Ace 2 that we uploaded to YouTube. We'll wait to get a review unit for a more in-depth look at the video quality.