Smartphone cameras are getting more interesting and the Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra– the most premium of the three comes with “Space Zoom”, which allows its cameras to offer a total combined optical and digital zoom of 100x. But, how does Samsung’s phone achieve this figure? It all comes down to a combination of optical zooming hardware, image processing, and an exceptionally high-resolution sensor.
Looking at the internals of this zoom on the Galaxy S20 Ultra, Samsung is relying on a “folded” 4x telephoto lens behind the hole in the back of the phone, which it’s combining with a 48-megapixel sensor. Then, between 4x and 10x zoom, the phone offers what Samsung is calling a “lossless hybrid optic” zoom, which relies on a combination of sensor cropping and binning where multiple pixels are combined into one big pixel. The use of the word “lossless” implies that Samsung doesn’t think you’ll see any loss of quality up to 10x zoom. Then, between 10x and 100x zoom, the phone is using similar methods, but it’s a digital zoom that will inevitably mean less detail as the zoom increases.
This 100x zoom is exclusive to the Galaxy S20 Ultra. The S20 and S20 Plus, meanwhile, offer a hybrid optical zoom that tops out at 3x rather than 10x, while their maximum zoom levels sit at 30x rather than 100x.
Before the Galaxy S20 Ultra
Its not the first time to see this zooming technique on a smartphone like the Galaxy S20 Ultra, last year, Huawei used a similar “folded” zoom lens on the P30 Pro. In Huawei’s case, it had an 8-megapixel sensor underpinning the telephoto camera with an optical zoom of 5x and was then able to add data from the camera’s main 40-megapixel sensor to offer a hybrid “lossless” zoom up to 10x. We don’t think this lossless claim was 100 percent accurate due to a slight loss of detail at 10x zoom, but it was a small drop in quality overall. The total digital zoom topped out at 50x, but well-lit images stopped being usable beyond around 32x. Meanwhile, the Oppo Reno 10x Zoom offered software-enhanced zooming up to 60x and used a similar hybrid system to zoom up to 10x.
A 108 Megapixel Camera
What distinguishes Samsung from Huawei and Oppo is that it’s using much higher-resolution sensors for both the Galaxy S20 Ultra’s periscope and main cameras. Samsung is using a 48-megapixel sensor with its periscope lens, while the Huawei P30 Pro’s telephoto camera had a resolution of 8 megapixels, and the Reno 10x Zoom’s was 13 megapixels. Then, the S20 Ultra’s main camera has an incredibly high-resolution 108-megapixel sensor, compared to the 40-megapixel sensor on the Huawei and 48-megapixel on the Oppo. The two sensors combined give Samsung’s handset access to more data, which could potentially result in more detailed images.
High resolution of a sensor has its own problems, such as worse low-light performance due to having smaller individual pixels. Samsung claims to have found a solution to these problems, but we won’t know whether it’s done so for sure until we can fully test the feature for ourselves.
