No, we don’t expect full-res 200MP astro shots yet
Samsung makes some of the best Android phones money can buy today, and its Galaxy S22 models from this year are arguably the most appealing of them all — well, other than its luxurious foldable phones. We’re now looking forward to the Galaxy S23 series, consisting of the S23 Ultra, S23 Plus, and vanilla S23 models. The latest hardware rumor is now attempting to build up our expectations for the flagship Galaxy S23 Ultra’s 200MP primary camera.
We’ve already heard a lot about the chances of a 200MP sensor being the primary lens on the Galaxy S23 Ultra, but leaker Ice universe on Twitter says the S23 Ultra’s behemoth of a sensor won’t just be ridiculously high-res, but will also have better performance in some key areas, delivering the “biggest improvement” in Samsung flagships in years. Specifically, the improvements could translate into better low-light photography and videography results.
The recent Expert RAW update made the current-generation Galaxy S22 series even better at astrophotography, and now this rumor suggests the Galaxy S23 Ultra’s 200MP low-light shots should be something to look forward to. However, it isn’t clear if the sensor’s improvements will come in the form of larger individual pixels, or some other hardware enhancement.
Still, we have a lot of questions (and a fair amount of doubt) about how well this really might work, and if we could expect a camera sensor on a smartphone to churn out acceptable full-resolution 200MP low-light photos. Pixel binning for low-light performance on high-resolution smartphone sensors is probably here to stay because the tiny individual pixels would struggle to capture adequate data to reproduce colors naturally.
Besides the 200MP primary, we can expect the Galaxy S23 Ultra to have a 12MP ultrawide and dual 10MP telephoto cameras. Under the hood, Samsung is likely to toss in the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 SoC along with up to 12GB of RAM and 1TB of onboard storage.
