Samsung Galaxy Young S6310 review: Just for starters

3MP fixed-focus camera

The Samsung Galaxy Young sports a 3 megapixel fixed-focus camera and there is no LED flash. That should be enough to tell you that the smartphone's camera will only do for an occasional photo when you have nothing else available.

The interface is virtually the same as on previous Samsung handsets touting TouchWiz. On the right there's the still camera / camcorder switch, a virtual shutter key and the gallery shortcut (which is a thumbnail of the last photo taken).

On the left, you get several controls and the good news is that you can pick any three shortcuts to put there - its let you easily have all frequently used features just a tap away.

The fourth shortcut always points to Settings. You can also move the icons around to your liking.

The camera interface

As far as features go, you get goodies like geotagging, smile detection, panorama mode, Share shot, scenes and effects. There's no touch focus, burst mode or HDR, but we can't expect the Young to match the big boys in terms of features.

3MP doesn't sound exciting at all, but the Galaxy Young has a decent shooters from the 3MP shooters pool we've seen. The level of detail is decent, but that's as much as it gets, really. Colors are too subdued for our liking, but you can adjust that from the camera.

Samsung Galaxy Young S6310 camera samples

Image quality comparison

We've put the Galaxy Young against some other 3MP snappers so you can check the image quality for yourselves in our dedicated Photo Compare Tool. You can choose other adversaries as you please, and all you need to look for is explained in the tools' main page.

Samsung Galaxy Young in our Photo quality compare tool

VGA video recording is disappointing

The Galaxy Young captures VGA video at around 24fps, which is rather poor, but sadly, that's about all you can expect out of a phone with a basic single-core processor and a 3MP camera.

The camcorder has the same interface as the still camera and some of the same settings.

Switching to camcorder mode

Videos are recorded in MP4 files with a bitrate of 2.0Mbps and stereo AAC sound (128Kbps, 48kHz). The resolved detail isn't great, but it seems as if the noise reduction is less aggressive to the video than it is to still images. Plus, the videos look smoother than expected.