How Samsungs Galaxy S20 Ultra achieves its 100x zoom

Samsung’s newly announced Galaxy S20 Ultra offers a new feature that the company is calling “Space Zoom,” which allows its cameras to offer a total combined optical and digital zoom of 100x. That sounds like one of the biggest zooms we’ve seen on a mainstream smartphone, but there’s a lot of nuance to how Samsung’s phone achieves the figure. In short, it’s all down to a combination of optical zooming hardware, image processing, and an exceptionally high-resolution sensor.

At lower levels of zoom, Samsung is relying on a “folded” 4x telephoto lens behind the hole in the back of the phone, which it’s combining with a 48-megapixel sensor. Then, between 4x and 10x zoom, the phone offers what Samsung is calling a “lossless hybrid optic” zoom,...

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