Galaxy S20 Ultra 5G camera: How Space Zoom, 8K and 108MP all work

One thing today's smartphones aren't short of is camera sensors, and the Galaxy S20 Ultra 5G is no different. Samsung's 2020 flagship may only have a single selfie camera – though with 40-megapixels to play with it's not exactly low resolution – but there are four sensors on the back. As you'd expect, each is tailored for different things.

The most ordinary is the ultra-wide camera. That has a 12-megapixel sensor with a 120-degree, f/2.2 lens. There's also a time-of-flight sensor, which measures depth, and which Samsung is using both for augmented reality and to improve its autofocus.

For sheer resolution, the 108-megapixel wide camera will take some beating. It's paired with a 79-degree, f/1.8 lens. By default, it'll capture 12-megapixel images: Samsung is using a technique known as Nona Binning, which effectively clusters 9 pixels at the sensor level together and uses their combined data for a single pixel in the final image.

The result, Samsung says, is 3x the light data as the S10's primary camera could rely on. Alternatively, you'll be able to switch to full resolution mode, and snap a whopping 108-megapixel image. Be warned, though: file sizes could easily reach 45MB a shot, Samsung suggests.

Finally, there's the telephoto camera, and here things get really interesting. At 48-megapixels it's actually lower-resolution than the telephoto sensors on the S20 5G and S20+ 5G. They clock in at 64-megapixels. That difference is because Samsung is handling zooming in two very different ways.

With its 64-megapixel sensor, to zoom Samsung does a basic crop: taking a section of the overall frame. That way it can boast of up to 3x lossless zoom, or up to 30x with the possibility of pixelation.

The Galaxy S20 Ultra 5G's telephoto sensor is combined with an actual optical zoom lens. It's a folded 4x zoom, that runs horizontally across the back of the handset. Prisms redirect the light.

As a result, the flagship can promise a 10x lossless zoom, and a faintly ridiculous 100x maximum zoom. Like you'd expect, even with AI doing some massaging, images at the full zoom do show a fair amount of pixelation. They can be tricky to aim, too – Samsung offers a little zoomed-out preview to show where you're actually pointing the camera in real-time – but for bragging rights it's hard to argue.

2019 was the year when smartphones really started competing on their low-light performance, and Samsung is aiming to set 2020's bar high with its improved Night Mode on the Galaxy S20 Ultra 5G. As before, the principle is straightforward. Capture multiple shots of the scene, with varying settings, and then combine them into a single image with much richer light data.

The difference is just how many shots are now used, and how they're different from each other. Samsung has doubled the number of pictures it relies upon for its Night Mode, compared to last year's S10, increasing it to 30.

It's also varying the ISO settings. With multi ISO composition, Samsung's new system can tweak the individual light sensitivity of each frame, giving it more data to work with for the final shot. The end result should be greater detail, without blowing out the brighter parts of the scene, though as with all night modes you'll need to hold still for anything from a few seconds upwards in order to get an image without blurring.