Fake Zoom, Samsung! Neither Galaxy S20 nor S20+ feature real Telefoto- or Zoom Cameras

[Redaktion]

After carefully inspecting Samsungs hidden specsheets for the Galaxy S20 and Galaxy S20+, we have to conclude, that neither the Galaxy S20 nor the Galaxy S20+ have any kind of real Telefoto- or Zoom Cameras. Instead Samsungs fake marketing wants you to believe a second wide-angle lens and a crop into a 64 megapixel image can be considered "Hybrid Optic Zoom". Only the expensive Galaxy S20 Ultra actually has a real Telefoto Camera

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Fake-Zoom-Samsung-Neither-Galaxy-S20-nor-S20-feature-real-Telefoto-or-Zoom-Cameras.453934.0.html

[TruthIsThere]

Wow! Shameless Samsung strikes again. This is why I come here to avoid the fake news for reviews. (Looking at you Engadget, DxO, GSMArena) Nice find, NotebookCheck!

[Helium007]

Once again we see that phone cameras are crap and will NEVER reach quality of midrange compact cameras.
First - using digital zoom in marketing? We are back in 2000s when super cheap digital cameras had fixed lens an marketed that crap as "3x zoom"? Cameras manufacturers actually found out this marketing was a really huge mistake because really bad quality and in few years nobody dared to advertise "hybrid" or  "digital" zooom at all. I actually never saw any cameras mady from alt 10 years that have digital zoom enabled by factory settings and many of them completely lack of this feature at all.

I have a feeling that mobile cameras are really in dead end and trying to do marketing show to sell products more than ever. Tele zoom is impossible because of thickness of phones, prism lenses are quite bad - Olympus learned that several years ago...
Manufacturers are simply strugling to make a "real" reasons why their cameras are better than competition. First we had more megapixels, than better AF, then better lenses and finally when inovations are saturated - more cameras with different lenses. Now there is almost no room for real impovements...

[S.Yu]

Ok, from the spec sheet this is true and certainly shocking, but from a technical perspective this whole setup really doesn't make sense.
Assuming the 64MP is the Tetracell HW1, the diagonal would be 9.3mm, 3/1.06=2.83, 9.3/2.83 is much smaller than the smallest sensor on the chart I found which was 1/4", and the resolution would be 7.1MP of Tetracell, close to 1.8MP of bayer, which is ridiculously bad(how on earth do they go to 30x?!), while a discrete 3x could be a 1/3.4" 12MP(at least f/2.4), that's much better! Why do this to people? Why do this to themselves?? People are gonna find out!
Actually, why advertise "hybrid" 3x when it could be anything beyond 1.06x? At 2x on paper it's already questionable if it's superior to the S10, if all these assumptions based on that FoV are true, then the real world performance would give them away before numbers come into question, which is just really, really stupid. I'd rather wait for live samples to see if something's amiss.

[S]

Shame on you Samsung.

Good work calling it out NC.

[vrvly]

😂

[_MT_]

You really should avoid saying things like real zoom. People should remember we have other words at our disposal. It shouldn't be just zoom this, zoom that.

When you have three cameras with three different objectives, all of them with fixed focal length, swapping between the cameras is not zooming, is it. You might have three cameras, but you have no zoom at all. You have three different perspectives. It doesn't matter how much difference is between them.

Not only that, "real zoom" objectives are something special. Even the things that camera manufacturers commonly sell and market as zoom are not really zoom. How so? A proper zoom objective has a wonderful feature - it maintains focus while you adjust focal length. This allows you to close in on whatever you want to focus on, fine tune the focus, then zoom out and compose your picture. A wonderful thing when you have only the optical viewfinder and manual focus to work with. Common, so-called zoom objectives are not like that. They're simply varifocal - they have variable focal length.

[Eme]

I feared this... I was testing the news S20ies in the shop and taking pics and the "zooms" didn't look good at all... Even for the S20 Ultra I was not at all impressed with zoomed photos... And on top of that the phones felt "cheap" and plastic in hand...
I think I'll wait for the Huawei P40 pro... if they'll improve the P30 pro that'll be a winner. And they have real optical zoom (albeit max 5x).

[amps]

I'm not very good in camera specs. I'm just curious on how they come up with the number 1.06x zoom based on the specs showed above. How do you compute for that? Thanks.

[xpclient]

A telephoto lens is named so because of its optical design, not its zoom, no matter what smartphones have been telling you.

Also, Field of View (FoV) is not the only definition of zoom. The focal length is also important. You can have create an optical design that will maintain a high FoV and still achieve zoom, if you create a larger image circle, for which you need a larger sensor and that's what a 64MP sensor is.

The narrowing FoV as you zoom in is simple to understand when you have ONE sensor and are moving a lens group relative to that sensor. But when you have multiple sensors you can design your lens to have a larger focal length and maintain a great FoV.

As anyone in photography knows, as you put a lens in front of a smaller sensor, what you get is an equivalent zoom with narrower FoV, but it's not the lens, it's the image circle exceeding the sensor area.

Anyway, I agree that whatever the design is and even if the results are good without a zoom lens  - Samsung should be transparent about it and not resort to fake or misleading marketing.

[fredskis]

I'm dubious about these claims. If the telephoto lens indeed has negligible "zoom", why is it that when you record in 8K you cannot record at that near 1x fov.
You are forced into the minimum zoom afforded by the zoomed-in 64MP telephoto lens

[S.Yu]

I'm dubious about these claims. If the telephoto lens indeed has negligible "zoom", why is it that when you record in 8K you cannot record at that near 1x fov.
You are forced into the minimum zoom afforded by the zoomed-in 64MP telephoto lens

That indeed may suggest the specs are wrong, but it could also be explained by the sensor doing 8K not by binning or line-skipping(which is typical, to preserve the FoV) but by doing full-pixel readout on a crop, in which case the CMOS would record 8K from the center ~33MP portion, which yields a ~1.4x crop from a 64MP sensor.

[Dimitri Canonne]

Considering all this, can somebody tell me why does it include a 12 megapixels MAIN camera, while the telephoto has the same field of view (i mean, almost) ?
Why don't they just use "secondary" 64 megapixels as MAIN and do the pixel binning things if ppl want 12 megapixels photos ?
I can live with the lie (because thx to you i'm starting to understand) but i don't like useless. Should i dislike my MAIN camera ?

[Ricci Rox]

Considering all this, can somebody tell me why does it include a 12 megapixels MAIN camera, while the telephoto has the same field of view (i mean, almost) ?
Why don't they just use "secondary" 64 megapixels as MAIN and do the pixel binning things if ppl want 12 megapixels photos ?
I can live with the lie (because thx to you i'm starting to understand) but i don't like useless. Should i dislike my MAIN camera ?

The 12 MP sensor is bigger and better.

[Shanna R Layton]

Thanks so much for confirming my thoughts on the "zoom" of my S20. Once enlarged it is very pixelly, not great quality at all. So upsetting. Not to mention, it means you also don't get the great affect of a telephoto lens on your images, only wide angle.