Samsung recently launched its latest flagship. Jumping directly from S10 to S20 in the nomenclature of its S series. The smartphone comes with a whopping 100x zoom. Well now that’s amazing, but how good is it?
Samsung calls this feature the “Space Zoom” which allows its cameras to offer a total combined optical and digital zoom of 100x. At lower levels of zoom, 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.
Now that’s kind of a complicated thing, but still, Samsung is the first one to reach this much of a zoom. Earlier Huawei and Oppo had reached up to 50x and 60 respectively. One of the bigger hardware differences between Samsung, Huawei, and Oppo’s phones is that Samsung is using much higher-resolution sensors for both the S20 Ultra’s periscope and main cameras. While the P30 Pro’s telephoto camera had a resolution of 8 megapixels, and the Reno 10x Zoom’s was 13 megapixels, Samsung is using a 48-megapixel sensor with its periscope lens.
But do we even need a 100x on a smartphone? For fun yeah we do. But regularly Nah!! When would you be using the 100x zoom, let us know.