Samsung upped their camera game with the Galaxy S10 lineup this year, delivering a vast array of different lenses and sensors that can do a lot of different things. But despite offering telephoto lenses for a few years, we haven't seen any other drastic improvements in optical zoom on Samsung's phones recently.
That might change with one of their upcoming phones, however. Samsung's Electro-Mechanics division has announced that they're mass producing a 5x optical zoom module for smartphones, which means it's ready to be used in phones. They didn't announce anything else, like what phone could be getting it first, but knowing Samsung there are a few safe guesses we could make.
The Galaxy Note 10 is quite obviously the biggest target for this advancement. Samsung's flagship in the latter half of the year always takes the Galaxy S and refines it in key areas, and improving the optical zoom seems to fit perfectly in that category. It's not necessarily a “new” feature but it's a big enough refinement to make a big deal about it and sell potential buyers on the Galaxy Note 10, which is going to have to earn its high price point.
Here's everything we know about the Galaxy Note 10
On the other hand, Samsung also likes to deploy brand new tech in mid-range phones. Crazy cameras, new designs, and other weird things always seem to end up in something like the Galaxy Alpha or Galaxy A80. Then, if it works well, it eventually bleeds over into the mainline Galaxy S and Galaxy Note families.
Hopefully we see this by the end of the year, but if not, I don't think it'll be long until your Samsung flagship phone can zoom in enough to match many digital cameras. Let's just hope that makes it worth over $1000.
source: SamMobile
Now if they would make it so that when idiots try to shoot videos in portrait mode the camera would automatically rotate into proper landscape aspect ratio that would save us all from crappy portrait videos that look like someone just isn’t smart enough to realize that how it looks on your phone isn’t working for anyone who wants to view it on any other device is forced to view the stupid blacked or blurred sides of screen to make up for the missing footage.
so assuming they mean 5x the standard 28mm smartphone lens, do they mean a 140mm equiv lens? I can’t see how that’d be useful very often. It would seem like a spec brag to me. I’d rather have a solid 3x 85mm equiv portrait lens with digital zoom for the occasional further subject. It just means that anything under 140mm has to be the main 28mm camera cropped in meaning most portrait photos are going to be sub par quality.