You are correct. I should be using the term focal length. The S3 is 26 mm and the S4 is 31. A small but annoying difference for close objects. Since this appears to be hardware is there a way to compensate for the narrower field besides stepping backwards?
As already said, it's matter of focal length. S4 has "worse" (longer -> narrower view) than S3.
S4 Active (i9295, this forum) has longer than S3 too but it seems that it has shorter (wider shot area) than vanilla S4 (i9505). Stepping back is probably the easies way.
You could attach lens to change this behavior but it's impractical for daily use, costly and quality of lens varies. There are also extreme modders who play with idea of exchanging whole camera modules and there are small cameras as mobile accessories too. But if I cared about camera in my phone that much I would probably choose phone accordingly in the first place or used real camera instead.
