Zooming in 100x on the Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra isn’t as cool as it sounds
It’s difficult to take a good shot at 100x zoom, but other zoom levels offer better result
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Shooting at 100x Zoom on Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra
When Samsung started touting the 100x zoom on the new Galaxy S20 Ultra, it probably sounded like an amazing feature to a lot of people. But the reality is quite different.
The S20 Ultra only has an optical zoom lens up to 4x. Anything more than that results in degraded image quality. The camera app still offers other preset zoom options, though, including 10x and 30x. How do these compare to the 100x zoom, and is there any reason to use these lower-quality digital zoom options? We have some answers for you.
The 100X blur
Since this is a smartphone camera we’re talking about here, I never expected great picture quality on the 100x zoom. So it wasn’t a big issue for me to find that the 100x zoom photos are very blurry. In fact, I even found the feature useful at times for taking a closer look at something far away.
When zoomed in all the way, the photos clearly don’t look good. Samsung says the S20 Ultra uses machine learning tech that ostensibly helps repair your 100x zoom image. Even so, it can’t work miracles. Your final images, if you somehow manage to stay on target to get the shot, are basically as high resolution as a watercolor painting.
