Samsung has Apple in its sights for top camera

Which smartphone camera is better: Apple iphone 14 Pro Max or the new Samsung S23 Ultra?

At its “Unpacked” event in San Francisco on Feb. 1, Samsung made an ambitious play for the crown. Its new flagship phone, the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra, boasts a 200-megapixel primary camera, more than any other device available in the U.S.

It has nearly twice the capacity for detail as the 108-megapixel workhorse camera in last year’s S22 Ultra. And more than four times the resolution of the iphone 14 Pro and the iphone 14 Pro Max, Apple’s current top-of-the-line models.

But there’s a dark side to all that resolution. And it mostly comes out at night.

In order to pack more pixels into the sensor beneath one of the glass lenses on the back of your smartphone, you’ve got to make the pixels smaller. And the smaller the pixel, the less light it can capture. That’s not a problem in broad daylight. But it is in low-light situations.

For the past four or five years, smartphone makers with at least 40-megapixel cameras counteract the low-light conundrum by pooling light from four or more pixels. The result of the technique, called pixel binning, is a lower-resolution shot – but with enough light to keep things sharper.

With the S23 Ultra, Samsung will let you pool either four or 16 pixels, depending on how much light is available. If you’re keeping score, that would result in pics with either 50-megapixel (200 divided by four) or 12.5-megapixel (200 by 16) resolution.

The primary camera in the iphone 14 Pro and Pro Max has 48 megapixels. In low light, Apple employs four-pixel binning to produce 12-megapixel shots.