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Samsung Teases Innovative New Galaxy S24 Ultra Capabilities

Fears that Samsung may downgrade the Galaxy S24 Ultra’s camera capabilities from the S23 Ultra appear to be unfounded in light of the company’s latest teaser videos, published ahead of this month’s much-anticipated Galaxy Unpacked event—but there’s a catch.

January 5 update below: article originally posted January 3.

In a recent official announcement entitled “Zoom with Galaxy AI is coming,” the company reveals a sequence of images of a hot air balloon showing a camera zoom range of at least 10x alongside a bizarre effect that appears to enlarge individual objects within a scene to comical sizes.

That zoom range of 10x won’t have been chosen by accident—The Galaxy S24 Ultra is expected to “downgrade” the Galaxy S23 Ultra’s powerful 10x optical telephoto lens to a 5x version, albeit at a much higher sensor resolution of 50 megapixels vs. just 10 megapixels in the current model.

The hot air balloon images appear to have been captured in low light, most likely around dawn. These are challenging conditions for such long-range telephoto optics, which typically capture less light than the primary wide lens. Here, the gap between 5x and 10x magnification will likely be filled using digital zoom and new AI processing, digital zoom being helped greatly by the much higher 50-megapixel resolution of the new 5x camera.

The “object zoom” effect revealed in the later video clips is harder to pin down. The videos show a woman performing a familiar pinch-to-zoom gesture, first on a plush toy and then on an ice cream cone, both of which then expand to enormous dimensions in real time. It’s a radically different feature, but both this and the low-light zoom feature above appear to fall under the banner of “Zoom with Galaxy AI.”

Posted on: 1/5/2024 2:30:47 PM


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