Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra camera samples highlight impressive night and zoom shots

The Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra has always been among the best camera phones, and we’re even more sure of that now, as leaked camera samples, reportedly shot with the phone, show off some impressive photography prowess.

Twitter user Edward Urbina (opens in new tab) posted a series of photos from night and zoom photography (via Notebook check (opens in new tab)), so let’s see.

First of all, night photography. For this Urbina posted two photos (opens in new tab) taken in presumably normal mode, alongside those in night mode (or perhaps astrophotography mode).

The normal shots are incredibly dark, giving an indication of how little light there was in the scene, while the night mode shots are impressively bright and packed with detail.

They’re far from perfect – there’s some noise, some mushy detail, unnatural colors on the foliage and they’re not perfectly focused. But given how little light there seemed to be to work with, the results are still strong.

Now we get to the zoom shots, with photos apparently shot at 1x, 3x, 10x and 30x zoom.

The Ultra line always excels at zoom shots, so it’s no surprise these look good – especially the first three, as the phone can probably zoom optically at those distances. However, the 30x zoom also looks fairly detailed – if not quite as sharp as the others, and considering the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra’s optical zoom probably tops out at 10x, that’s impressive.

Indeed, leak @UniverseIce (opens in new tab) claims this shot looks as good as a 20x zoom shot on the Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra, so while the optical range might not be better this year, the overall quality of zoom shots – and digital zoom in particular – could be improved .

Of course, these are just a few photos, we can’t be sure they’re real, and we don’t have any comparisons to the Galaxy S22 Ultra or other phones. So don’t read too much into them, but they look promising either way.

With the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra expected on February 1, we will soon know exactly how good the cameras are.

Opinion: zoom looks good, but next year should be much better

From everything we’ve seen and heard so far, it seems likely that the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra will take the crown as the best camera phone, replacing the Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra, which currently holds the top spot.

With a new 200MP primary sensor and improvements to both night and zoom photography, there should be a fair number of photographic upgrades here – but next year the company should focus even more on zoom improvements.

Samsung is arguably at the forefront of zoom photography at the moment, as rival handsets don’t offer 10x optical zoom, but they may catch up soon. Google is gradually closing in, with 5x optical zoom offered on the Pixel 7 Pro, and Apple will reportedly put a periscope camera on the iPhone 15 Ultra.

Meanwhile, Samsung has done little to advance zoom photography in recent years. The software has been improved, but the hardware improvements are minimal and nothing has changed in the maximum optical zoom distance on the Ultra phones.

So if the company wants to maintain its lead, we might need more than 10x optical zoom on the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra – or some other trick, like the continuous optical zoom offered by the Sony Xperia 1 IV.