Thread by @sondesix

Firstly, I'm gonna talk about how the camera of the Galaxy S21 Ultra works.

Basically, in a scene where the light source is too minimal, the phone will recognise the scene as too dark and it won't trigger the native 3x tele sensor.

1st pic: 1x
2nd & 3rd pic: 3x (digital zoom)

You can see the example with those three pictures.

Why?

Well obviously, it's because the phone thinks that it'll be better to use the main sensor as it has a narrower aperture and bigger size compared to the telephoto sensors.

The phone also thinks that "Oh, we also have our own software to make the picture look better anyway, despite being cropped from the main camera."

Well, look at the EXIF data from one of the 3x pictures shown in the first tweet.

In other words, the phone thinks that the 3x tele sensor is going to be useless in that situation, so it's better to use the main camera instead.

The same thing can also happen if you want to shoot a low-light scene at 10x.

Instead of using the 10x telephoto sensor, it's going to use the 3x telephoto sensor.

That's because, again, the phone thinks that "oh okay, at 10x, of course the main camera can't keep up with the 3x telephoto camera. Let's just use the 3x tele this time."

See how it works?

And now, the problem is not if the S21 Ultra has a horrible camera system for zooming and can't keep up with the likes of iPhone 13 Pro Max, and so on.

The problem is that, the algorithm is stupid enough to think that way, because that amount light source (see the first tweet of this thread) was definitely more than enough for the 3x telephoto sensor to handle.

And using night mode will definitely improve the quality.

Another thing that's annoying is how inconsistent the algorithm is.

It looks like the phone just wants to trigger the 3x telephoto sensor when it's in a mood for it.

These pictures were taken with a very similar light source and time, yet the phone triggered the 3x tele sensor.

I really want Samsung to fix this via an update.

It's not that hard to do, really.

I'm disappointed because it seemed like the Galaxy S20 Ultra doesn't do any of those weird stuff with its 4x telephoto sensor.

Granted, S20 Ultra's 48 MP telephoto sensor is a lot bigger than S21 Ultra's 10 MP telephoto sensors.

But it's not going to change the fact that those zoomed-in, low-light shots are going to look a lot better once Samsung manages to fix this problem.