Samsung’s new zoom breakthrough for smartphones promises to supercharge your low-light portrait photos
- Samsung has announced a new kind of telephoto camera design
- It helps telephoto cameras combine bright apertures with sleek designs
- This is especially beneficial for portrait photos in low light
The world’s best camera phones have vastly improved their telephoto cameras in recent years, but Samsung has just unveiled a new technology that could boost their performance while keeping the phones acceptably slim.
Announced in a blog post on Samsung’s Semiconductor website (spotted by Android Authority), the so-called ‘ALoP’ technology rearranges the layout of Samsung’s current periscope camera design.
The main benefit is creating space for lenses with a brighter maximum aperture (which theoretically means less noise in low light) without making the camera bump bigger. Currently, the lenses in Samsung’s ‘folded’ telephoto camera module sit vertically in line with the phone’s body. The downside to 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 (just like a traditional camera lens) on the back of the phone, with the prism then reflecting that light back to the camera sensor. This means a wider, brighter lens can be added without the phone feeling like a ridiculous Energizer phone.
But while that is a promising development, we should not expect any physical miracles. Samsung says the ‘ALoP’ system creates enough space for an aperture of f/2.58 at a focal length of 80mm.
That’s a 3x telephoto camera and a reasonably bright one at that, better than the f/2.8 aperture of Apple’s 77mm telephoto camera in the iPhone 15, but still far behind the best f/1.2 portrait lenses you’ll see on the best pro cameras. Yet, 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 saving of Samsung’s ‘ALoP’ design, a more radical improvement could be the inclusion of two periscope telephoto cameras in a future Galaxy phone.
Earlier this year, the Oppo Find
There’s a strong argument that a good 3x telephoto camera is more useful for most people than the 5x or 10x options we’ve seen in recent years. A 3x lens has a focal length somewhere in the 75mm-80mm range where many professionals shoot portraits – the focal length provides natural bokeh while still being relatively flattering to the subjects.
So if Samsung can improve the quality of its 3x periscope systems with this new ‘ALoP’ system, while leaving plenty of room for the inclusion of those longer 5x or 10x telephoto cameras, it could create a well-rounded camera phone with few weaknesses.
Samsung calls ALoP a “future telephoto camera solution” with no indication of an expected launch date, but the release of the information suggests we could see it in a 2025 phone.
