How Is the Galaxy S20 Ultra’s 100x Space Zoom Feature Achieved?

Omar Sohail
Galaxy S20 Ultra’s 100x Space Zoom - How Is the Feature Made Possible?

After months of leaks, the Samsung Galaxy S20 series has finally been announced, and as expected, the family consists of three handsets: the Galaxy S20, the Galaxy S20 Plus, and the Galaxy S20 Ultra. However, when talking about camera specs, it goes without saying the Galaxy S20 Ultra’s 100x Space Zoom is the real star of the show and we’re sure that the feature will have a lot of eyeballs on it. However, how did Samsung make this feature possible? Let us find out.

Using a Folded Lens, Hardware and Some Impressive Software Processing, the Galaxy S20 Ultra’s 100x Space Zoom Becomes More Than Possible

To bring you up to speed, the Galaxy S20 Ultra camera specs include a 12MP ultra-wide unit, a 108MP wide module, and a 48MP telephoto sensor. The device is capable of 4x optical zoom and 10x hybrid optic zoom. The 10x zoom is of the lossless hybrid kind and the Korean giant uses pixel binning and sensor cropping to achieve it.

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On top of that, as mentioned before, it can also pull off 100x zoom by using the phone’s various sensors and its software. In case you didn’t know, the South Korean giant has used a folded zoom lens, so the hole on the camera bump is connected to a prism to redirect light to the camera unit. The phone combines the output from its 48MP sensor and optical zooming gear and then adds image processing to the mix too. This helps the Galaxy S20 Ultra’s 100x Space Zoom become a possibility.

In addition, there’s also a high-resolution and beastly 108MP primary camera to collect more data and churn out detailed photographs. This will help if when you’re using the sensor to capture an image where there’s sufficient surrounding light. Coming back to the Galaxy S20 Ultra’s 100x Space Zoom feature, not everything is sunshine and rainbows.

For one thing, Space Zoom isn’t lossless, which means some loss of image quality is definitely expected. The advantage Samsung has here over competitors who have used similar techniques in the past is the higher resolution sensors belonging to Galaxy S20 Ultra. The company even claims that there should be no performance issues in low-light settings as it has found a fix. Hopefully, we can expect to find more about the real world zooming performance of the Galaxy S20 Ultra in the coming days.

You can check out more of our Galaxy S20 coverage below:

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