Asus had a great time in the Indian market in its initial days, but the Taiwanese brand is off the radar nowadays. With increasing craze for selfie-centric smartphones, Asus also jumped on the bandwagon by launching three selfie centred smartphones a couple of months ago.
The Asus Zenfone 4 Selfie (base model) priced at Rs 9,999, the Asus Zenfone 4 Selfie Dual Camera, priced at Rs 14,999, and lastly, the Asus Zenfone 4 Selfie Pro (first impressions) priced at Rs 23,999.
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The Zenfone 4 Selfie Pro offers decent hardware for the asking price. In fact, it matches with many of the budget smartphones in the same price range. However, the standout feature of the Zenfone 4 Selfie Pro is the dual camera setup on the front.
Asus Zenfone 4 Selfie Pro-Camera Specs
The Zenfone 4 Selfie Pro comes with a primary 12MP Sony IMX362 sensor, along with a 120-degree wide-angle 5MP shooter. Asus is touting a 24MP DuoPixel mode in the smartphone. Wait what is that, does it produce 24MP selfies?
Yes, it indeed produces 24MP selfies, but with some software magic from Asus. The Sony IMX362 sensor has two photodiodes under each pixel, and the company used a software trick to separate the information from both the pixels and combine them when this 24MP selfie mode is enabled.
That said, we get 24MP selfies for sure, but what's the biggest letdown for this feature is that you need to ultra steady while capturing a photo. Otherwise, you will end up with shaky images. Also, we noticed that the images are larger in size compared to the ones shot with the standard 12MP shooter, and they lack details too, which is underwhelming.
Coming to the selfie camera performance, the Zenfone 4 Selfie Pro captures decent selfies, much like other selfie smartphones from Oppo and Vivo. The images captured in bright light has sufficient details, but that's not the same with low-light images. The colours are accurate, but sometimes, they come out very cold.
Let's not forget the secondary dual camera. The Zenfone 4 Selfie Pro has a 5MP wide-angle shooter accompanying the primary camera. When activated, you get wide-angle shots. Being a smaller resolution sensor, the images look washed out on bigger screens.
There's a Portrait mode as well, which again is based on software processing, and doesn't inspire confidence. Enabling the HDR mode helps in some situations, but not in all situations. The Asus Zenfone 4 Selfie Pro is amongst the few smartphones to offer 4K video recording from the front camera, the other smartphone I know is the Nokia 8. The wide-angle camera records just 1080p videos though.
Talking about the specifications of the Zenfone 4 Selfie Pro, it flaunts a 5.5-inch AMOLED display and is powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 625 chipset, coupled with 4GB of RAM and 64GB of internal storage. The storage can be expanded up to 2TB with a microSD card.
At the back of the phone, we get a 16MP sensor, and the device boots Android 7.0 Nougat based Zen UI on top. It is backed by a 3000mAh battery.
All in all, the Zenfone 4 Selfie Pro seems to be a compelling option in the sub Rs. 25,000 price segment. It intensifies the selfie game in the similar price range. However, there' still some work left to Asus with this smartphone, especially they need to improve the much-touted 24MP DuoPixel mode to make the device stand out from the crowd.
