TheSamsung Galaxy S23 Ultrarubs shoulders withour favorite camera phoneslike the Pixel 7 Pro and Xiaomi 13 Pro. However, there’s always room for improvement. Unsurprisingly, everyone turned to AI this year, including Google, which announced severalAI-powered photo editing utilitiesearlier this year. Now, the Galaxy S24 series debut is inching closer, and it’s Samsung’s turn to showwhat it can pull off with AIand high-end camera hardware.
TheGalaxy S24 seriesis expected to feature the familiar trio — S24, S24+, and S24 Ultra. The design of the S24 should stay relatively unchanged from the current flagship, but atitanium frameperhaps inspired by the iPhone 15 launched this year could be in the cards. As far as specifications go, leaks and rumors point to the recently announcedQualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3SoC paired with up to 12GB of RAM and 2TB of storage. We should see a familiar 200MP ISOCELL sensor handling primary camera duties, but leaks suggest Samsung will use theHP2SX sensor. As the name would lead you to believe, the HP2SX is an incremental upgrade from the HP2 in the S23 Ultra, with most of the advancements shining through as optimizations and refinement.
In this vein, the South Korean brand recently shared a YouTube video (viaAndroid Authority) detailing advancements planned for its upcoming 200MP sensors. We suspect this refers to the HP2SX in the S24 Ultra models, and unsurprisingly, AI plays a big role here. First off, the video demonstrates a feature called ISOCELL Zoom Anyplace, which helps the phone automatically zoom in and track subjects you select. The device then outputs two video files shot simultaneously on the same lens — one zoomed in on the subject you chose, and another of the zoomed-out view in full resolution.
Zoom Anyplace could make post-processing much easier, because you won’t be stuck with the cropped video if you zoomed in mid-recording. Samsung says you can maintain 4K resolution output even on the footage tracking the subject, even when you zoom in and out. The feature is designed to perform optimally at 2x and 4x zoom, without significant distortion in color or perspective. However, this development could also substantiate previous speculation suggesting Samsung mayditch the 10x telephotocamera seen on the S23 Ultra.
The video also touches upon an image processing pipeline upgrade dubbed End to End (E2E) AI Remosaic. Samsung says that instead of capturing sensor data sequentially like a conventional camera, AI Remosaic captures it in parallel, slashing image processing times. Samsung doesn’t explain in clearer terms what’s happening in the processing pipeline, but we like the idea of not waiting on the phone to finish processing 200MP shots.
Although it appears these AI improvements will be exclusive to upcoming flagship phones with 200MP cameras, like the S24 Ultra, we hope the older models can pick them up as well in future updates. After all, AI models need computational muscle, and not unique hardware. The new Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 may just process data faster and more efficiently than its predecessor.
