Who can zoom harder, Samsung or Google?
That question will certainly be answered in the coming weeks after the launch of the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra, the latest premium flagship smartphone from the Korean tech giant. Revealed at the Galaxy Unpacked livestream on Wednesday, the S23 Ultra’s big claim to fame is its powerful new camera system.
But is it better than the best-in-class Google Pixel 7 Pro? Let’s look at the numbers.
Samsung’s major selling point this year is a brand new 200MP main sensor. Yes, two hundred megapixels. It’s a very big, impressive-looking number, and it’s joined by a 12MP ultrawide lens and a pair of 10MP zoom lenses. Samsung is promising that this new camera array can produce unparalleled zoomed-in photography, with its “Space Zoom” feature enabling up to 100x zoom.
This is the Pixel 7 Pro with no zoom.
Credit: Alex Perry/Mashable
And this is the Pixel 7 Pro with full zoom.
Credit: Alex Perry/Mashable
However, it’s going to be hard to dethrone the Pixel 7 Pro. Its 50MP main sensor isn’t as big as Samsung’s, but it has a 48MP telephoto lens that can zoom up to 30x. Again, the numbers aren’t as big, but the results speak for themselves. Pixel 7 Pro takes some of the most impressive zoom photographs on any smartphone, so Samsung has a lot to live up to there.
Oh, and both phones have 12MP ultrawide lenses, in case you were wondering.
People around the tech world will need to do a lot of photo testing to find out which phone camera is truly better in practice, not just on the spec sheet. Samsung and Google both employ a ton of software processing to make photos look better, and there isn’t feature parity between the two. Google has the Magic Eraser tool and Samsung has 100x Space Zoom, for example.
But, at the very least, Samsung can say it has the most megapixels. Maybe that will count for something.
