Correctly. The foldable you saw advertised with flashy colors and catchy pop music while watching AEW Dynamite is my go-to camera right now. Camera hardware is completely irrelevant. There’s a 10-megapixel camera on the internal display, a 12-megapixel ultrawide and a vaguely upgraded 12-megapixel main camera. Samsung’s promotional material says the sensor is “65 percent brighter,” which is really nonsense — a sensor collects light. it cannot be “brighter”. What Samsung is trying to say is that the pixels are a little bigger, so they might collect light a little better. Anyway, all of this is to say that the reason I dig using the Z Flip 4’s camera doesn’t have much to do with… the cameras. It is the folding action. I must be a fool because I’ve tried shooting in all the ways Samsung advertises using the Z Flip 4, and I love it. I opened the phone to the L shape above the microwave and filmed myself making a latte. Why; I do not know. But I sped it up in the camera app, set it to The King Khan & BBQ Show’s Love You So and posted it on TikTok. To my utter dismay, it has been viewed over 200 times. I don’t know what I’ve really accomplished here, but it was fun. Low angle portraits of a toddler on the go? Why not! I would have liked 3x zoom, but this is fine. Flip is also an absolute gold mine for creating content for grandparents. I can put the Flip on a table — safely out of toddler’s grubby hands — and video the grandchild doing precious things like banging cups together while yelling and farting loudly. Grandparents love this mess. The Fold is useful here because I don’t have to a) try to take that selfie style b) fiddle with some other mechanism like PopSockets to support it and c) I can adjust the angle precisely to get it right the framing. When I’m done, I can just (gently) shut the thing down to stop recording — although at the end of your video clip, the phone will appear to shut itself off, so maybe cut it a bit. This is all great fun, but if you don’t have a toddler and don’t want to show off your latte art skills on TikTok, then I probably haven’t convinced you that the Flip 4 camera is really any good. But consider this use case: with the camera app open and the phone in an L shape, you can tap an icon to move the image preview to the bottom half of the screen. You shoot what’s right in front of you, but you look down at the image preview, like an old-school twin-lens reflex camera. The best camera is the one that folds in half. This is a candid photo of my friends, who are ghosts. This also means you can take photos comfortably from a lower angle or take candid social photos without sticking your phone in front of your face and making everyone feel confident because you’re obviously taking their photo. Please note that I do not condone being creepy or weird to strangers. it’s just nice to take pictures of your friends without taking everyone out of the moment so abruptly. I’m not a big selfie taker either, but it’s nice to be able to use the phone’s main cameras when I want to take one. Of course, you have to compose it on the cover screen with an image preview that is the actual size of a postage stamp, but I’ll take that trade-off for the much better image quality, especially if the lighting conditions are low. And who knows, maybe my homemade espresso bar will really take off on TikTok and I’ll need to up my selfie game. If it does, you can bet I’ll have the Flip 4 ready. Photo by Allison Johnson/The Verge
