Samsung Galaxy S22: The Best Camera Phone?
Samsung recently announced a trio of attention-grabbing smartphones at its annual Galaxy Unpacked event. As you might imagine, the Galaxy S22, Galaxy S22+, and Galaxy S22 Ultra all sport a capable array of cameras: The S22 and S22+ offer ultra-wide, standard, and 3x zoom views, while the S22 Ultra offers an additional 10x optical zoom lens.
The zoom lenses close one of the remaining gaps in features between smartphones and compact cameras, which are slowly dwindling out of favor. Many smartphones already perform better in low light than affordable dedicated cameras—for example, the night shot modes from Apple, Google, and Samsung all produce results well beyond what you can expect from point-and-shoots.
The competitiveness between modern smartphones and most point-and-shoots is one of the reasons we focus our camera coverage on enthusiast gear and lenses. But when it comes to flagship phones intended to serve as your sole camera, it's worth seeing how they stack up to dedicated imaging devices. With that in mind, we took the new Galaxy S22 devices on a photo walk to see how well they fare.
The S22 and S22+ have the same rear camera setup, including an ultra-wide 0.6x lens for broad views, a standard 1x lens with a bright aperture for low-light shots, and a 3x telephoto for portraits. The S22 Ultra adds a 10x optical lens to the mix, making it a bit more versatile for trips to the zoo, or in my case, to a local trail with birds, squirrels, and other suburban wildlife. It also offers 100x digital zoom, but image quality drops off quickly beyond the 10x optical setting.
The sensors behind the main lenses are a differentiating factor, too. The S22 and S22+ use a 50MP sensor for capture, but the best results come from a
Read more on pcmag.com
