Samsung Galaxy A5 review

Presentation, key features and design

What does it look like to use?

Battery life and camera

Verdict and competition

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Battery life

Excellent battery life

Quick charge

Not damaged by screen always on< /p>

The Samsung Galaxy A5 has a 3000 mAh battery, which is the same capacity as the

Samsung Galaxy S7

even though this phone has a much lower resolution filter. As we expected when first powering up the A5, the phone lasts a long time without charging with normal use.

Listening to a few hours of streaming podcasts, a few annoying bursts of browsing the internet, taking about 50 photos, and using WhatsApp regularly, the battery only drains to 40-50% at bedtime. Excellent.

For heavy users, the

Motorola Moto Z Play

always wins for endurance, and we're not counting on the Samsung Galaxy A5 to get a full two-day's use. But he will come close.

In our standard battery test - in which we play a video on a loop for 90 minutes, the Galaxy A5 2017 had lost just 12% by the end. That's a bigger drop than the Moto Z Play's 7% drop, but it's slightly less than the 14% lost from the

OnePlus 3T

, and a result well above average overall.

It's not just down to Samsung's use of a large battery, as Samsung's Super AMOLED displays are known for their efficiency and the Exynos 7880 uses an up-to-date 14nm production process. This helps it consume less energy for the same results.

All our tests were also activated with the screen always on. You can read more about it in the display section, but it effectively turns the Samsung Galaxy A5 into a desk clock when not in use.

Finally, the Samsung Galaxy A5 also comes with a fast charger. A normal higher power charger outputs at 5 volts, 2 amps, but Samsung's fast chargers step up to 9V to almost fully charge the battery in an hour.

Camera

Very high -res sensors, but average quality

No OIS

Capable of super detailed selfies

The Samsung Galaxy A5's cameras have an excess of megapixels which looks great on the bulleted description you'll see next to the little guy in a phone store, but the rear camera in particular doesn't have the tech to make it a rival for the best, including the Galaxy S7 or even

Galaxy S6

.

It's good, but not really great.

The only area it stumbles in is the usual: low light. This phone has no optical image stabilization, and the high megapixel count comes at the expense of the size of the pixels themselves.

As a result, photos in poor indoor lighting and at night start to degrade a bit as noise reduction algorithms work on images, chewing up both noise and fine detail. We've also found that it's quite easy to take blurry photos if you're not careful to keep your hands still.

It's a means of the rival

HTC U Play

< p> beats the Galaxy A5, because it has OIS, which makes blurry exposures much less likely.

Either way, we had a lot more fun using the Galaxy A5's camera than the HTC because it's much faster to shoot. There may be a small pause before the shutter releases as the camera fine-tunes its focus, but no obvious shutter lag or shock lag while the phone processes a photo before letting you take another. This is what a camera phone should look like.

If you like to get creative with your phone's camera, there are better choices, though. The Galaxy A5's manual mode is extremely uncluttered, with no control over shutter speed or focus. As such, it is hardly worth using.

In good light, the Samsung Galaxy A5's photos look pretty good, but are susceptible to some issues that don't affect the more adept Galaxy S7. For example, shadow areas can look a little dark unless you're actively using HDR mode. The sensor's dynamic range just isn't great and there's no smart Auto HDR mode, which is now very common.

There's also purple fringing on high-contrast objects, like tree branches against a blue sky, and while the colors are generally well saturated in good lighting, they're slightly off at times. In a few of our shots, we noticed a classic sign of a less-than-perfect camera setup: blue skies that end up looking a bit greenish through the Samsung Galaxy A5's eyes.

At the pixel level, the Samsung Galaxy A5 photos also look a bit smoothed or processed, which is the software that dampens the small sensor pixels here.

What you should take from this is that the camera isn't on par with the Galaxy S7, the

iPhone 7

Where

LG G5

. However, it can still take good photos and, above all, is great fun to use. Pleasure matters.

Camera samples

Image 1 of 8

Use HDR mode and the Galaxy A5 can hack more challenging varied lighting levels like this. Without using it, the shadows end up looking cloudy.

Click here to see full resolution image

Image 2 of 8

The color of the sky is a bit off from here, and up close the processing only leaves you with as much texture on the rusty dinosaur as a low resolution sensor. Still, not bad, right?

Click here to see full resolution image

Image 3 of 8

Here is a good example of the Galaxy A5's minor league purple fringing, visible around the small branches/twigs. However, this does not spoil the photo.

Click here to see full resolution image

Image 4 of 8

Even though this greenhouse only takes up a third of the photo, you can still make out the fine ornamentation of its close-up of ironwork.

Click here to see full resolution image

Image 5 of 8

The focus in this photo is marred a bit by the thick glass used in the walls of the aquarium, but shows a slight drop in color vibrancy in lower light.

Click here to view the full resolution image

Image 6 of 8

We used fast burst mode to take this shot. Just hold down the shutter button and you can shoot a handful of images in a second.

Click here to see full resolution image

Image 7 of 8

Here we've used the exposure slider, which sits next to the focus point, allowing you to play with the brightness of a scene. Lowering it a good bit made this image much more dramatic.

Click here to see full resolution image

Image 8 of 8

The Galaxy A5 did very well here, and you can see the f/1.9 depth of field in action with the blurry "frame" in the foreground, but the brick texture has been smoothed out more than we'd like.

Click here to see full resolution image

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