Samsung is using the 200MP sensor on the wrong camera

Samsung has used 200MP main cameras on its Ultra phones for several years now, dating back to 2023’s Galaxy S23 Ultra. This enables benefits like 200MP full-resolution snaps and higher-quality cropped zoom.

The recently launched Galaxy S26 Ultra maintains the 200MP primary camera, albeit with a wider aperture. However, I can’t help but think Samsung is using the 200MP sensor on the wrong camera. Here’s why.

There are a few benefits to having a phone with a 200MP main camera. One upside is that you can shoot full-resolution 1x photos and still get detailed crops after the fact. That’s handy if you’d like to get a 2x or 3x crop from your 1x photo without a huge loss in image quality.

Another upside of 200MP main cameras is that they enable good-quality 2x to 4x shots via lossless-resolution zoom. That’s because the sensor has so many pixels that even cropping to 4x still leaves you with a ~12MP photo that hasn’t been upscaled. This zoom capability is particularly great for mid-range phones without a telephoto camera. It means cheaper phones can still offer decent or even good 2x to 4x images. And I’m all about improved camera zoom.

Then again, Samsung’s Ultra phones all have 3x 10MP telephoto cameras. So you don’t have to resort to a 3x or 4x crop from a 200MP main camera when you have a 3x camera right there. In saying so, Samsung really needs to upgrade its 3x camera as it’s absolutely ancient at this point. But that’s an article for another day.

I’d love to see Samsung’s Ultra phones adopt a 200MP telephoto camera instead of a 200MP main shooter. That’s because I firmly believe all those megapixels can be put to better use for high-quality cropped zoom.

Android phones with telephoto cameras already offer lossless resolution to a point. For example, the Nothing Phone 3 has a 3x 50MP camera capable of taking 6x lossless-resolution snaps. Meanwhile, a phone like the Pixel 10 Pro can spit out 10x lossless-resolution shots from its 48MP 5x camera. But zoom beyond those points, and these phones rely on super-resolution, AI, and other processing techniques to salvage your images.

However, 200MP telephoto cameras extend even further than 48MP or 50MP tele shooters. OPPO says its Find X9 Pro offers an impressive 13.2x lossless resolution zoom via a 200MP 3x camera. My own experience with the vivo X300 Pro and its 200MP 3.5x camera is that you can still take good-quality 10x photos with a relatively shallow depth of field. Image quality is a gamble at 15x to 20x, though. Furthermore, even ~10x photos from these cameras aren’t immune to excessive sharpening or the dreaded watercolor effect. Nevertheless, check out some longer range 200MP telephoto camera samples below.

These phones also let you shoot full-resolution photos, allowing you to extract a detailed crop after the fact. This usually wasn’t worth the effort on the first phones with 200MP tele cameras, but some of the latest phones now offer multi-frame image processing at 200MP resolutions. That means you’re getting higher-quality full-resolution snaps with less over-sharpening and reduced noise, which means your crops look better too.

My colleague Rita El-Khoury also thinks that a 200MP 5x telephoto camera would be amazing. This would be a significant engineering challenge, as you’d somehow have to fit these parts into a relatively small space. Nevertheless, I’d also love to see this, as it would enable lossless-resolution shots at 10x and 20x.

Needless to say, I’m a big fan of 200MP telephoto cameras. So I’d love to see Samsung swap its 200MP sensor from the main shooter to the tele lens. The company could then use a large 50MP sensor for its main camera. And who knows, this might solve the Ultra line’s infamous shutter lag problem once and for all.

In any case, it feels like Samsung is sticking with a 200MP main camera out of stubbornness more than anything else. It’s almost as if top company execs are only sticking with a 200MP main shooter because previous Ultra phones had it.

It’s also possible that Samsung is worried about the thickness of the camera bump by adopting a 200MP periscope lens. That’s a fair concern, but I’m sure I’m not the only one who’d take a camera bump if it means much better zoom.