Galaxy S24 camera: Google-like AI smarts, an impressive 5X telephoto camera and more
The Samsung Galaxy S24 series has some pretty amazing camera hardware, especially if you know how to use it to its utmost potential. The new high-end S24 Ultra comes with some new hardware, while the whole lineup makes use of AI to elevate the Galaxy camera experience.
Initially, there were complaints about bugs related to white balance, image quality and noise, color accuracy the ExpertRAW camera app, Text clarity in high-zoom shots, and more. Thankfully, Samsung later fixed those problems with software updates.
Among the upgrades that came with the Galaxy S24 were larger pixels for the S24 Ultra that are capable at capturing more light, better image stabilization, and new video formats.
The other S24 camera upgrades came in the form of more natural post processing with real-life colors and less artificial sharpening, which the whole S24 lineup benefited from.
Of course, you also got new AI features—which Samsung continues to expand—such as the ability to remove unwanted objects or the ability to create slow motion video even when it wasn't recorded in that mode.
Galaxy S24 Ultra camera upgrades
The Galaxy S24 Ultra keeps its quadra-camera system at the back, with a 200MP wide (main), 12MP ultra-wide, 10MP 3X telephoto, and a new 50MP 5X telephoto camera with a periscope lens. There's also a 12MP front camera embedded in the display. Here are all of the featured upgrades:
- Larger pixels: The Galaxy S24 Ultra has been equipped with larger pixels. More specifically, we are talking a 60% increase in size, which makes the S24 Ultra an absolute beast for low-light photography.
- More powerful stabilization: The S24 Ultra comes with wider optical image stabilizer (OIS) angles and better hand-shake compensation, which helps with low-light and improves video stabilization. This also affects the new 5X telephoto camera, so you can make use of the improved stabilization even when shooting at high zoom levels.
- Going from a 10X zoom telephoto camera to a 5X: The Galaxy S24 Ultra drops the 10X zoom telephoto camera that made the Galaxy S23 Ultra stand out, swapping it with a 5X zoom one instead. This might seem like a downgrade, but the new telephoto camera has significantly more megapixels, jumping from 10MP on the S23 Ultra to 50MP. From the S24 Ultra sample shots that we took during our hands-on experience with the phone it seems that it is at the very least as good as the S23 Ultra's 10x telephoto camera.
- A whole new level of 4K video: The S24 Ultra comes with the ability to shoot 4K video at 120fps, which allows for some super smooth and fluid motion, but the real gem in this upgrade lies in the ability to create quality slow motion video afterwards in a video editing app.
Galaxy S24 and Galaxy S24 Plus camera upgrades
The Galaxy S24 and S24 Plus usually don't get as big of an upgrade as their more expensive Ultra counterpart, which is why it comes as no surprise that we will probably see the same triple camera setup at the back. Those three cameras will be the wide (main) 50MP, a 12MP ultra-wide, and a 10MP 3X telephoto.
The good news is that even though no new hardware is expected, Samsung is planning on introducing lots of AI (artificial intelligence) smarts to elevate the camera systems of its new flagship lineup to the next level.
- Clearer images: Samsung has new hardware to the S24 that is specifically designed to reduce noise (grain) in photos and videos. The S24 is also capable of analyzing gyro information to distinguish between the user's movements during video recording and the movements of the subject that's being filmed. This applies to all cameras, back and front, and allows more effective noise removal and clear videos in the dark, even from far away.
- A more natural look: Samsung has added a dedicated color tuning solution, which means the S24 series now takes photos with more true to life hues, that appear natural. This also ties in with a less aggressive contrast, so shadows and highlights contain more details in them, resulting in a somewhat flatter image at times.
- Magic eraser on Samsung: Much like Google makes it possible to erase subjects from a photo as if they were never there, Samsung is has also made this possible. Users can use what Samsung's has dubbed Galaxy AI editing tools to erase, re-compose, and remaster (autoedit) a photo. You can move a person somewhere else on a photo, or correct a picture's angle, and the phone then uses generative AI to fill in the blank space and seamlessly blend it in.
- Get slow-mo on the spot: Samsung has also used the S24's new-found AI prowess to make it possible for users to watch a video in slow motion even if it wasn't shot as such in the first place. The feature is called Instant Slow-mo, and it creates additional frames to artificially increase the overall number so that the motion can appear slower that it was in real life.
- Finally, live HDR previews: Galaxy phones have had one arguably annoying characteristic to them. You would take a photo and the image would look one way in the camera app, but then it would go through the phone's software and appear completely different. That's something every phone does, but the difference is that some, like Samsung's phones, do it after the photo has been taken. Well, now what you see on the screen before you tap the shutter button will be what you get after the photo has been saved to your gallery.
- Premium camera features integration with social apps: The S24 series is the first to integrate the S Series camera features directly into social media apps like Instagram. Additionally, HDR videos will now also appear on social media the same way they look while being shot and viewed in the phone's gallery.
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