Last year, smartphones with a periscope-type camera began to appear. First, OPPO showed a mysterious smartphone at the presentation during the MWC 2019, which was supposed to take pictures with a tenfold optical zoom. A little later, he was born under the name OPPO Reno. Huawei also offered his solution in the P30 Pro model. Those cameras did very well at great distances. Even from a distance of several hundred meters, the subject could be seen as a whole. It would seem that everyone should come out with such smartphones, but something went wrong. So Samsung jumped off. What does it mean?
Are you waiting for this smartphone?
Why is there an assumption that Samsung should go this way at all and offer cameras with a periscope design in its smartphones? All due to the fact that they are, if not a leader, then definitely one of them in their field. The cameras of the Galaxy S and Galaxy Note are very good, and the increase in resolution can of course be considered as a further improvement, but it is already sufficient. It is better to master really new directions. Moreover, the camera with a prism was received by the market as a whole positively.
This is what makes the speculation about 10x optical and 100x digital zoom in the Samsung Galaxy S20 very logical. Moreover, the advertisement “Space Zoom” and the code name of the camera of the upcoming flagship spoke in addition in favor of this. Someone decided that it should be called “Hubble” – like a telescope.
It turns out that there will be no tenfold zoom? Today, a Korean source from The Elec announced that local companies Optrontec and Actro, which are likely to supply camera modules for the new flagship, will produce modules with 5x, not 10x magnification.
Remember how much talk there was about Huawei releasing a 5x optical 50x hybrid camera? This was talked about, probably even more than about the shooting speed of over 7000 frames per second in the Huawei Mate 30 Pro, although it is also very interesting. It turns out that a year later Samsung was not supposed to repeat the achievement of the Chinese, but to surpass it, because it is still unknown how the company from the Middle Kingdom would respond.
Apparently, this is the camera module.
Such a response would undoubtedly be something more weighty in the fight against a competitor than US sanctions, which it is not yet known how long will last and how they will affect Huawei. It turns out that Samsung once again missed an excellent chance to realize its advantage? Maybe.
By the way, according to rumors, the company could implement such a module already in the Samsung Galaxy Note 10, but did not do it and saved it as a killer feature of the spring flagship. If such a module had been applied at the end of last summer, this decision would have been much more timely.
On the other hand, up the sleeve of the new Samsung Galaxy S20 will be a 108MP module that will allow you to compose cool 12MP shots and allow you to play around with changing the actual magnification. It may not be optical, but it will be without loss of quality at the same resolution. They may even be able to surpass the current record 60MP hybrid zoom in the OPPO Reno 10x ZOOM.
Why do you need optical zoom?
I don’t think it’s worth explaining that optical zoom is much better than digital, when pixels are simply stretched, gradually turning the image into a bright mash of broken lines and colors. But why does a smartphone need it?
It's simple. The smartphone has long replaced the camera for many people. How long have you seen a man with a “soap box”? DSLRs and system cameras do not count, as they provide a completely different image quality and are used by many as a hobby.
Magnification without loss of quality is almost the only thing that the smartphone lacks.
Against this background, it is the possibility of increasing without loss of quality that looks like a very logical vector for the development of mobile photography. Surely, every person has more than once found himself in a situation where a two-fold increase in the second module was not enough to shoot the desired scene.
An example of a photo taken on the Huawei P30 Pro from the stands during a football match between Levante and Atlético last May.
I fully support the decision of companies to develop in this direction, but we have already seen enough of a 5-fold increase. If the young brand repeated this achievement of the Chinese, it would be very cool, but we are talking about such a monster as Samsung, which shows that it can only repeat, but not surpass. It's a shame …
On the other hand, if the industry and technology are not really ready for high-quality images with 10x optical zoom yet, you should not rush. It will just be very unpleasant if Huawei, despite its difficulties, does it in the P40 Pro, but Samsung does not.