Samsung Galaxy A7 (2018) review: Stands out with its triple camera setup

Price: Rs 23,990
Rating: ***1/2


Putting in more cameras in the smartphone is the new trend. As it stands, it’s a great way to overcome the limitations of smartphones (thickness) while giving you more camera features. Huawei had the first triple camera phone (the premium P20 Pro) but Samsung is now offering a triple camera setup at a far more affordable price.


The triple cameras are vertically stacked along with a LED flash. You get a 24MP primary sensor with f1.7 aperture, 5MP f2.2 depth sensor and an 8MP f2.4 ultrawide sensor. The camera takes excellent images in daylight — good details, rich colours and great dynamic range. Even in lowlight, the images captured had good details and suffered from minimal visible noise. We also loved the bokeh mode — edge detection is great and so is the amount of bokeh in photos. One of the things the triple camera gives you is ultrawide — a 120-degree field of view.

This really expands what all you can do with your smartphone camera. It’s a lot like an action camera — you essentially don’t have to use the panorama mode. But like any ultrawide lens, images have a visible distortion (curve effect) on both sides of the frame. The ultrawide lens is also fixed focus, which means no tap to focus. We found ultrawide unusable in low light because it failed to focus properly 8 out of 10 times. In theory, the triple camera does offer more features but it still needs some work. Front camera works great in daylight as well as outdoors but in lowlight it tends to soften details. It also has a selfie focus feature for bokeh effect in selfies which delivers good results — keep in mind that it takes a second to process the photo and add bokeh effect after you tap the shutter button.

Being a mid-range device, the A7 follows the premium design style of Samsung phones we have seen in 2018. It has a metal frame with glass on the front and back — while this gives the device a premium feel and appearance it also makes it a fingerprint and dust magnet. Within a week of usage we could see tiny scratches on the edges of the phone — a case is necessity with this device. One thing we did not like with the design was the placement of the fingerprint scanner (integrated with the power button on the side). For starters, this position makes it very uncomfortable for left handed users. Even for right handed user, front or rear placement just feels more natural and a lot more ergonomic.

The phone has a 6-inch super amoled display with a resolution of 2220 x 1080 pixels in an 18.5:9 aspect ratio. As always, we were very impressed by the screen — it has excellent brightness, punchy colours and wide viewing angles. It also has the Always On Display feature to show notifications and other widgets on a black screen when locked — great for saving battery.

The A7 is powered by Samsung’s Exynos 7885 octa core processor which is roughly at par with a Snapdragon 636 in overall performance. Combined with 4GB RAM, the phone works smoothly for most day-to-day tasks and even runs PUBG in medium settings without any issue. However, we did notice that if there were several apps running in the background, the phone tends to start becoming sluggish. Battery life is as expected — the 3,300mAh battery lasts from 9am to 9pm with around 15% battery to spare.

On the software front, it comes with the older Android 8.0 out of the box which is disappointing. You also have Face unlock feature but it feels iffy — at times it works flawlessly whereas other times it would take several seconds to identify and unlock. Even after few days of use, it did not improve. That makes it unreliable as a primary unlock option in our opinion.

For a mid-range offering, the Samsung Galaxy A7 stands out of the crowd with a triple camera setup. Camera enthusiasts will love the ultrawide lens even though it is not worth using in low light. If you’re not interested in ultrawide, there are better options available from Xiaomi (Mi A2), Vivo (V11 Pro) and Oppo (F9 Pro) that you can consider for roughly the same price.