Samsung’s 200MP sensor has one very clever new video trick for the S24 Ultra
Samsung has reignited the megapixel war by unveiling some new camera features for its 200MP image sensor – and a notable trick that could give the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra bragging rights over the iPhone 15 Pro, at least for video.
The new feature, called ISOCELL Zoom Anyplace, uses the significant resolution of Samsung’s 200 MP sensor and the grunt of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 to let you simultaneously shoot a wide field of view with a zoomed-in tracking shot of a person or subject.
Samsung wants to emphasize that this feature doesn’t just digitally crop your image, but instead uses what Samsung calls “in-sensor zoom” to preserve video resolution and detail. Similar to Google’s Super Res Zoom technique, the cropped area of the sensor is reshaped (or reinterpreted), allowing you to capture smaller parts of your scene in 4K resolution.
Combine this with automatic subject tracking, powered by Qualcomm’s AI engine, and you have a potentially powerful video mode that can give you alternative shots and angles, without sacrificing your wider composition.
This idea is not entirely new. The Sony ZV-E1 recently arrived with an Auto Framing feature, which gives you three different crops of the entire image area and tracks a subject as it moves through the frame.
We’ve also seen Honor introduce a Solo Cut mode, while the DoubleTake feature of the Filmic Pro app also pioneered multi-camera shooting from a phone (albeit with different cameras rather than sensor crops).
But the Zoom Anyplace feature still certainly looks like a versatile, easy-to-use implementation of the concept. The only question is which phone it will appear on first, but we have a good idea: the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra is expected to have a 200 MP sensor and the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, so it will almost certainly be the one that debuts this feature when it launches in January or February 2024.
Analysis: Video is the next battlefield
Mirrorless cameras have offered on-sensor crop modes for some time, as opposed to digital zoom, and these techniques generally offer better image quality than simpler digital crops.
But the results are not necessarily ‘lossless’ either and it remains to be seen how well ISOCELL Zoom Anyplace works in practice. In reality, it will probably produce better results in well-lit environments, so don’t necessarily expect it to be a professional multi-cam setup at your next concert.
Still, this ability to ‘zoom in’ on photos and videos while maintaining resolution was one of the main reasons the iPhone moved to a 48 MP sensor (after years at 12 MP resolution), and this use case for the Samsung’s 200MP sensor resolution is an interesting one given the continued interest in the best YouTube cameras.
200MP photos are less useful, but Samsung is also promising faster processing thanks to another new feature called End-to-End (E2E) AI Remosaic. In short, this allows remosaicing and image signal processing to occur simultaneously, rather than one after the other, reducing the frustratingly slow capture time of 200MP snaps.
It certainly sounds like the battle for the title of best camera phone will be just as fierce in 2024 as it was this year.