The Samsung Galaxy S24 is another milestone in photography – for better or for worse
The Samsung Galaxy S24 delivers the next-generation photography companion that the Samsung Galaxy Camera promised to be twelve years ago – a rethinking of what we can expect from our pocket cameras.
Multi-frame processing is no longer the killer smartphone trick. Thanks to generative AI, phones like the Galaxy S24 are now starting to imagine and even perform complex operations. If Ny Breaking‘s former camera editor, that prospect remains quite staggering. A few years ago I was reviewing compact cameras like the Sony RX100 series, which now look about as advanced as a Kodak Brownie.
Starting with the Galaxy S24 and Pixel 8 Pro, phones will not only be able to automate the photo-taking process, they will also take care of the post-processing. To some extent, they already do this – but as our hands-on Samsung Galaxy S24 review shows, the promise of “pro-like AI operations in a snap” isn’t yet consistently delivered. “Artifacts” could become the word of the year in photography, given how big generative AI is about to become.
Nevertheless, whatever your thoughts on algorithms softening your memories, the S24 confirms that this technology is here to stay – and its implementation on Samsung’s new flagships has left me with seriously mixed feelings…
The case for
The Galaxy S24 series certainly does a lot right. An “AI-powered camera,” as Samsung calls it, could easily get carried away and unleash a flood of fakes and deepfakes on social media. The S24 has even played it safer than the Pixel 8 Pro, which pushes the boundaries of social acceptance with its face-swapping Best Take feature.
There are some really useful new features. The ProVisual engine on the S24’s device can look at your photos and make editing suggestions, for example “erase shadows” and “erase reflections.” What’s impressive is that these are by no means simple operations; these are things that a few years ago would have weighed heavily on even a professional photo editor.
For me, the highlight of the S24’s camera reveal was Instant Slow-Mo for video. Shooting scenes in slow motion is something that professional shooters are once again struggling with these days. With traditional cameras, you have to anticipate when something spectacular is going to happen and choose a high frame rate and shutter speed, which comes with compromises.
However, because Instant Slow-Mo can generate additional frames based on movement in the scene, you can achieve the effect instantly by holding your finger on the screen while recording standard 4K/60p video, or afterwards when the action is over . It doesn’t work perfectly yet. Our hands-on test found that it produced some “weird artifacts,” something I’ve also seen with certain Pixel 8 Pro features like Magic Editor. But the idea is certainly promising.
In a similar vein, I also like that when the Galaxy S24 uses generative AI to enhance an image, it adds a watermark to the image and its metadata. That’s a sensible move that mirrors efforts by Sony, Canon and Nikon to combat deepfakes with digital signature technology and Adobe’s Content Authenticity Initiative (CIA).
But I also have three big concerns about the Galaxy S24’s AI tricks and what it will do for photography and video – or what Samsung likes to call ‘content creation’…
The case against
The first concern is simply that once the Galaxy S24 makes AI editing mainstream, won’t our photos all end up looking the same? As much as Samsung claims the S24 will learn your favorite editing style, the ProVisual engine has one goal: to make your photos and videos look as “perfect” as possible. To be a T-1000 for annoying imperfections.
Samsung says the goal of its AI-powered camera is to “bring your creativity to life.” I would say it achieves the opposite. Like the best AI art generators, these Galaxy AI editing tools give an incredible impression of creativity. They make your holiday photos look like they came straight out of a glossy brochure – and there’s nothing wrong with that; but let’s not pretend that they encourage creativity. They can make our memories all look strangely homogeneous.
My second concern might be more old-man-yell-at-cloud. I can’t really criticize Samsung for adding a Generative Edit feature to the Galaxy S24 series that allows users to move objects around photos. After all, Google and Adobe have both let the generative genie out of the bottle. But given the popularity and reach of the Galaxy series, this feature could once again be a significant game-changer.
From now on, our camera rolls will no longer be digital photo albums or diaries, but more Pixar-style dream worlds that you can’t fully trust. Yes, image manipulation is as old as photography, and all digital photos are a form of recreation to some extent, but this is different. Somehow I don’t think watermarks and metadata will turn that tide.
These arguments about generative AI are probably as old as the horse owners who condemned the rise of the car, but my final concern is probably more universal. The Galaxy S24’s fine print revealed that “Galaxy AI features will be offered for free on supported Samsung Galaxy devices until the end of 2025,” after which there will likely be some sort of subscription.
We don’t yet know which functions will be paid for, but the conclusion is clear: smartphone giants like Samsung see AI-based camera functions as the next cash cow in the form of cloud storage. Somehow this feels even worse than that: the shielding features in an already expensive pocket camera are reminiscent of BMW’s doomed attempt to charge a subscription for heated car seats.
We’ll see how that turns out, but I don’t remember paying a subscription for portrait mode. Granted, portrait mode doesn’t require expensive cloud processing, but smartphone cameras are about to get a lot more cluttered and confusing – and that undermines the usability of these new AI features.
You press the button, we do the rest
It’s been an incredible five years for smartphone cameras – and with the Samsung Galaxy S24 we’re moving into the next era of mobile photography, an era where we have an intelligent robot photo editor in our pocket.
The Google Pixel 8 Pro ushered in this era, becoming the first smartphone to integrate generative AI directly into its photography process. But the Galaxy S24 series, with features like Edit Suggestion and Genative Fill, promises to take it mainstream – and that will be as important as the advent of computational photography in 2016.
The S24’s ProVisual engine definitely needs another major overhaul, and AI photo editing is far from a consistent magic trick. But as someone who’s spent years reviewing cameras, it certainly feels like the start of something big – as well as the modern successor to Kodak’s famous “you press the button, we do the rest” campaign for his early cameras (that was a whopping 135 years ago).
At the time, photography was derided by painters and artists as a soulless, mechanical impression of true creativity. Maybe generative AI editing will finally win me over; but for now, Samsung has done an impressive job (subscription issues aside) of bringing it to the Galaxy S24 series in a useful, understated way. We will soon find out exactly how well it all performs in the real world in our full Galaxy S24 review.