Samsung's new smartphone zoom breakthrough promises to boost your low-light portrait shots

And all without a massive camera bump, too

News By Mark Wilson published 18 November 2024

• Samsung has announced a new kind of telephoto camera design
• It helps telephoto cameras combine bright apertures with slim designs
• This is particularly beneficial for low-light portrait photos

The world's best camera phones have improved their telephoto cameras greatly in the past few years, but Samsung has just revealed a new technology that could boost their performance while keeping its phones acceptably slim.

Announced in a blog post on Samsung's Semiconductor website (spotted by Android Authority), the so-called 'ALoP' technology reshuffles the layout of Samsung's current periscope camera design.

The main benefit is creating space for lenses with brighter maximum apertures (which theoretically means less noise in low light) without increasing the size of the camera bump. Currently, the lenses inside Samsung's 'folded' telephoto camera module sit vertically in line with the phone's body. The downside of this setup is that adding a wider lens makes the camera bump thicker.

Instead, the 'ALoP' (or 'All Lenses on Prism') system places the lenses horizontally (much like a traditional camera lens) to the rear of the phone, with the prism then reflecting that light up to the camera sensor. This means a wider, brighter lens could be added without making the phone feel like a ridiculous Energizer phone.

Still, while that is a promising development, we shouldn't expect physics-busting miracles. Samsung says the 'ALoP' system creates enough room for an f/2.58 aperture at a focal length of 80mm.

That's a 3x telephoto camera and a fairly bright one at that, beating the f/2.8 aperture of Apple's 77mm telephoto in the iPhone 15, but still well short of the finest f/1.2 portrait lenses seen on the best professional cameras. Still, as Samsung says, the system would still promise "low-noise portrait images in night shots", which is one of the most popular photographic genres for smartphones.

Room for two periscopes?

Given the apparent space savings of Samsung's 'ALoP' design, a more radical improvement could be the inclusion of two periscope telephoto cameras in a future Galaxy phone.

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