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Asus has endowed the ZenFone 5 with an 8MP camera with an f/2.0 aperture lens and an LED flash that should help it take better pictures in all conditions. It also has Asus' proprietary PixelMaster technology that is designed to help you take professional quality photos.
Using the camera is a simple but extremely flexible affair given the camera app that the ZenFone 5 comes with. On loading it up you can take a picture or start capturing a video immediately. While this dual capability can help start videoing faster, things can be hard to frame as the highest resolution images are in a 4:3 aspect ratio and video is captured at 16:9.
There are various modes available, accessed by tapping the button in the bottom right corner. Time rewind starts capturing images before you press the shutter button and is genuinely useful. You get to choose the best image from a bunch of stills captured two seconds before pressing the button and one second after.
The miniature mode is quite interesting as well. It blurs most of the image but leaves a section clear and is nice for highlighting a section of the image. There is also the ability to generate animated GIFs, a special portrait mode, and smart remove which can take moving objects out of the frame by capturing multiple images and comparing them.
There is the depth of field mode for generating bokeh effects, which are a bit fake but work as well as any other unplanned optical effect. Night mode is quite ineffective as well, but does bring out a little more detail in night shots. The HDR mode is quite fast but the output is frankly a bit weird.
Beyond these modes there are also various effects that can be applied to images and the viewfinder will show how the effect works in real time. Two different speed burst modes are also on offer, which work well enough and provide a nice interface for picking the best shot after it has been taken.
Video is captured at up to 1080p but the bit rate and frames per second are not brilliant. There is no form of stabilisation either so videos can be quite shaky.
The overall quality of the camera is a fair step better than most devices at the price point with only the LG G2 Mini coming close in my view. Daytime shots are reasonably well detailed though tend to be a bit overexposed.
In lower light, the ZenFone 5 does quite well with images remaining sharper than expected and avoiding some of the muddiness that I would normally associate with smartphone cameras in low light. It does struggle a little in these conditions to get an even sharpness across the frame though, with the focus point of the image being noticeably sharper than the rest of the picture.
Dynamic range is also lacking and sometimes the colour balance will be off, but ultimately the ZenFone 5 will do a decent job of capturing your memories.
Camera samples
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