What Is Zoom With Galaxy AI, And How Does It Work?
For the past several years, Samsung has differentiated its top-tier smartphones from the rest of the Android pack by equipping them with startlingly long zoom reach. The trend began with the Galaxy S20 Ultra, which boasted a 100x zoom capability with a 48 MP telephoto lens, and last year's S23 Ultra continued that trend. Now, with the upcoming release of the Galaxy S24 lineup, Samsung is hyping up something new, which it calls Zoom with Galaxy AI. If the Galaxy S24 rumors and leaks are true, the S24 Ultra will come equipped with a 50 MP telephoto lens to achieve that legendary zoom capability. But while the hardware seems as though it will be extremely capable, Samsung is adding even more features to its software this time around.
In promotional videos and images for the upcoming Galaxy Unpacked event on January 17, where the S24 lineup is expected to be announced, Samsung teased Zoom with Galaxy AI on a pre-order page for the new phones. One photo shows a hot air balloon being zoomed in on, with the balloon's basket being enhanced to clearly show the people sitting inside. Meanwhile, two videos show a woman at a fair enlarging small objects—an ice cream tone and a teddy bear, respectively—to gigantic proportions. Based on these teasers and combined with what we already know about the S24's hardware specifications, it seems like Zoom with Galaxy AI will take advantage of new generative AI capabilities enabled by the phone's new chipset to deliver image enhancements for pictures taken in telephoto mode.
Zoom with Galaxy AI will use generative models to enhance telephoto pictures
While we don't know exactly what Zoom with Galaxy AI will do on the new Samsung Galaxy S24 lineup of smartphones, it's safe to say that these new photography features will revolve around some sort of image enhancement powered by the phone's onboard AI cores. The S24 lineup will be powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 processor, and Qualcomm focused heavily on its expanded generative AI capabilities when that SoC was announced. We've already seen Samsung show off new features like Zoom Anyplace that rely on these expanded AI capabilities.
The teaser videos released by Samsung may offer a clue as to what Zoom with Galaxy AI is capable of. All three of the clips on the pre-order page show people enlarging small objects: a distant hot air balloon, a teddy bear, and an ice cream cone. One of the new features will likely be the ability to enhance objects shot from a distance in telephoto mode by using generative AI to extrapolate a high-quality image from the original, less detailed one. Essentially, it would function much like the AI image upscaling tools already available to the public, except built directly into the phone's image pipeline or added into Samsung's native photo editing suite.
Another possibility is that Zoom with Galaxy AI will be object-specific, enhancing user-selected details from images. For example, selecting a teddy bear from a photo featuring a tableau of carnival prizes may generate a larger image of that object. Such a feature would not necessarily be restricted to photos taken with the telephoto lens. It would also compete against AI features from other manufacturers, such as the Google Pixel 8's Best Take feature.