Asus Zenfone 2 Laser Review

Photos by Marvin Conanan

In the continuous rise of mobile photography as another medium of art, every mobile brand has been taking part of the trend through developing the best imaging systems possible for their smartphones. Asus also delves in this trend and develops the Asus Zenfone 2 Laser that boasts the precision 13MP PixelMaster Camera technology with Laser Auto Focus. This certain feature caught our attention, and we thought of giving it a try.

So we used the Asus Zenfone 2 Laser to take photos to see how well it performs, and to try out some interesting features. Among the selection of camera settings, these are what we tried out; Auto, Super Resolution, Manual and Depth of Field.

And to start it off, below are the photos we took with the Super Resolution setting. More than the 13MP Camera, the phone will produce a detailed photo equivalent to 52MP when this setting is chosen. The Super Resolution setting takes and combines four 13MP photos to create a single image, which explains the jump of quality from its normal camera output. A comparison of this setting with the Auto setting can be seen below. We particularly like this setting, however there are some minor setbacks that we noticed. The slow processing of the photos will be a problem when one needs to take photos continuously, while the large output size will be fairly difficult in terms of storage and file sharing.

Another interesting setting that we found is the "Depth of Field". Talk about processed bokeh for all your blurry needs. But as much as we advocate natural blurs because most processed ones do not look nice at all, this setting kind of proves us wrong. The range of the blur is elaborate enough to just get how much blur we want for each photo. Plus the main subject pops out naturally when done right. 

And lastly, we also tried out the Asus Zenfone 2 Laser's Manual setting. It's really astonishing to see that we could control this much from the camera of the phone. The setting let's users manually adjust the focus, ISO, Shutter Speed, Exposure Value and White Balance. This is very useful for those who wants more control over their photo. The ISO ranges from 50 to 800, while the Shutter Speed can take as slow as 1/2 and as fast as 1/1000. Below is a look on the setting when used on the Zenfone 2 Laser, while the photo below is a sample shot we took with an 800 ISO and 1/2 Shutter Speed. 

To sum it all up, the phone camera performs really well as promised. With it's affordable price, it's definitely a good smartphone for mobile photography enthusiasts.