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Size, they say, doesn’t matter, but in the case of the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra, it might. I’m not referring to the phone’s size. It’s about the size of the S23 Ultra’s main camera (rumoured to be 200 megapixels) and what Samsung could do with it.
The rumours of a 200MP main camera have piqued my interest in the upcoming Samsung phone. In fact, it may finally entice me to reconsider my decision to switch from Android to iPhone almost two years ago.
High megapixel counts in smartphones have long been associated with poor camera performance. As our phones editor Jordan Palmer pointed out in a recent chat, many low-cost phones have large megapixel cameras but are far from the best camera phones.
This is due to the fact that much smartphone photography relies on software and computational photography to produce pleasing images. And we see it in action with the iPhone 14 Pro, Google Pixel 7 Pro, and Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra.
This is most likely due to the fact that the three brands have reached a point where computational photography and AI-enhanced image signal processing can only do so much with 12 megapixels. As a result, the iPhone 14 Pro now has a 48MP sensor, the Pixel 7 has a 50MP sensor, and the Galaxy S22 Ultra has a 108MP camera.
But, while each phone’s smart processing produces a unique flavour of photo, they all have one thing in common: a high-megapixel main camera. Whereas the predecessors of these flagship phones used 12MP main camera sensors for multiple generations (most notably the iPhone 13 Pro), phone makers have moved away from tried and tested sensors in the last two years.
So, what’s so exciting about the rumoured 200MP sensor on the Galaxy S23 Ultra? It all comes down to the amount of detail that such a camera can capture.
More megapixels imply higher resolution images with more detail. That means there’s more data for smart software to process, which should result in sharper, more detailed, and richer photos, even if the final shots are only 12MP or 50MP.
What’s particularly intriguing to me is that this additional detail should mean that when you crop a photo, you don’t lose a lot of detail and clarity. This has been a problem with previous smartphone photos; they appear great at first glance, but when you zoom in, you notice aberrations, excessive smoothing, or smudged textures. As a result, when I want to do “serious” photography, I have to use my DSLR. While it’s great for producing images that can be easily manipulated in post-production, getting a good shot takes some skill, especially when the lighting is less than ideal.
Now, I’m not the worst photographer, but my strengths lie in capturing words rather than scenes. So, for a photo that will look good without much effort, I sometimes use my smartphone. A phone’s processing can take a dull shot and make it much brighter and clearer. However, when cropping into a shot, it has the aforementioned limitations. If the rumours are true and the Galaxy S23 Ultra has a 200MP camera, it could offer the best of both worlds. If the flagship phone can capture full 200MP photos, not only will it have more detail to work with, but there will be a lot more scope to edit and crop into a shot without it becoming a hazy mess.
Of course, the Galaxy S23 Ultra will most likely have the dual telephoto cameras found on its predecessor, and one could argue that these are the cameras to use for detailed close-up shots. I wouldn’t argue that, but sometimes you only decide what to punch into after the fact when viewing a shot. Having the scope and pixel count to better manipulate such shots will undoubtedly be a boon for on-the-fly photographers like myself who don’t always have a DSLR on hand. We can see a 200MP image cropped by 12x thanks to an apparently leaked Galaxy S23 Ultra photo. And it appears to be swaddled in detail, with sharp edges.
With a Galaxy Unpacked event scheduled for February 1, we won’t have to wait long before Samsung finally unveils its new flagship phone and we can see if megapixel size really does matter. Source
Nonetheless, Samsung’s computational photography has advanced by leaps and bounds in recent years, and it has even reduced a tendency to oversaturate colours. So I’m quietly confident that the Galaxy S23 Ultra’s 200MP sensor and overall camera system will deliver the goods and dethrone the iPhone 14 Pro Max as the best phone on our list. The quality of these shots will be determined by the processing applied by Samsung, or by whether the S23 Ultra allows you to capture RAW shots at 200MP and easily edit them. There have been reports that the iPhone 14 Pro over-processes photos taken with its 48MP camera, though my colleagues on the phones team haven’t complained about it… yet.