The Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra was always likely to rank among the best camera phones, and now we are even more certain of it, as leaked camera samples, said to have been captured on the phone, show impressive photography skills.
Twitter user Edwards Urbina (Opens in a new tab) Posted a series of shots showing night photography and zoom (via NotebookCheck (Opens in a new tab)), so let’s take a look.
First, night photography. For this, Urbina Post two photos (Opens in a new tab) It was taken in supposedly normal mode, along with night mode (or maybe astrophotography mode).
picture 1 from 4
Normal shots are incredibly dark, giving an indication of how little light there is in the scene, while Night mode shots are impressively bright and full of detail.
It’s far from perfect—there’s a bit of noise, some mushy detail, unnatural colors on the foliage, and it’s not quite as focused. But given the lack of light that seems to work with the results are still strong.
Now we get to the zoom shots, with the photos apparently taken at 1x, 3x, 10x and 30x zooms.
MARCIANOPHONETecnonautaTV #s23ultra pic.twitter.com/kFQ38i5GgtJanuary 22, 2023
The Ultra line always excels at zoom shots, so it’s no surprise that they look good — especially the first three, since the phone can probably visually zoom in at these distances. Still, the 30x zoom does look fairly detailed — if not quite as sharp as the others, and considering the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra’s optical zoom probably tops out at 10x, that’s pretty impressive.
Actually, the leak @employee (Opens in a new tab) It claims that this shot looks as good as the 20x zoom shot on the Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra, so while the optical range may not be better this year, the overall quality of zoom shots — especially digital zoom — could be improved.
Of course, these are just a few pictures, we can’t be sure they’re authentic, and we don’t have side-by-side comparisons with the Galaxy S22 Ultra or other phones. So don’t read much into it, but it looks promising regardless.
With the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra expected on February 1, we’ll know exactly how good its cameras are soon.
Opinion: Zoom looks great, but next year it should be much better
From everything we’ve seen and heard so far, it seems likely that the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra will take the crown as the best camera phone, replacing the Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra, which currently holds the top spot.
With a new 200MP primary sensor and improvements to night shooting and zoom, there should be a fair number of photographic upgrades here – but next year the company should focus more on zoom improvements.
Samsung is arguably at the forefront of zoom photography right now, with competing phones not offering 10x optical zoom, but it may soon catch up. Google is closing in gradually, with a 5x optical zoom offering on the Pixel 7 Pro, and Apple will reportedly put a periscope camera on the iPhone 15 Ultra.
Meanwhile, Samsung hasn’t done much to push zoom photography forward in the past few years. The software has been improved but the hardware improvements have been minimal, and there’s no change to the maximum optical zoom distance on the Ultra phones.
So, if the company wants to maintain its lead, we may need more than 10x optical zoom on the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra – or some other trick, like the continuous optical zoom offered by the Sony Xperia 1 IV.