Samsung just concluded it’s long awaited Unpacked event and boy, were there no surprises! The S20 series was launched just as it was leaked, with the Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra packing the most punch among the three. The stand out feature of the device is undoubtedly the 100x “Space Zoom”.

A 100x zoom feature in smartphones is unheard of and it puts the likes of Huawei’s P series, which is supposed to specialize in photography to shame. But how exactly does Samsung’s latest flagship device achieve such an insane figure? Let’s break it down.

Samsung’s “folded” 4x telephoto lens, combined with it’s high 48-megapixel sensor takes care of any low level zooms before what Samsung calls it’s “lossless hybrid optic” zoom kicks in at around 4x-10x zoom. It relies on a combination of sensor cropping and binning where it basically takes a bunch of pixels and combines it into one big pixel. Now it’s worth noting that while the word lossless implies that there is no loss in quality up to 10x zoom, that word has been thrown around quite lightly in the past.

Huawei for example, also offered a “lossless” zoom of up to 10x that didn’t quite live up to its name when we tested it out. The S20 Ultra however does have a bigger sensor so we’ll have to wait and see. Between zooms of 10x-100x, the phone will then utilize a digital zoom, which of course will result in a loss of detail the more you zoom in.

Now, this “folded” zoom lens isn’t technology that’s unique to Samsung. Huawei’s P30 Pro and OPPO’s Reno 10x Zoom utilize the technology as well, but to different results. Taking Huawei as an example, the P30 Pro had an 8MP sensor underpinning the telephoto camera and the optical zoom was 5x. This combined with the main camera’s 40MP sensor offered that aforementioned hybrid “lossless” zoom.

Of course, the big difference between the S20 Ultra and the P30 Pro is that Samsung utilizes a much higher resolution sensor for bot it’s main and periscope cameras. The P30 Pro’s combination of 40MP+8MP pales in comparison to the S20 Ultras 100MP+48MP setup but bigger resolution sensors don’t mean a better result. The S20 is likely to face problems such as worse low light performance, and even though Samsung have claimed they have a solution, we’ll believe it when we see it.

While the S20 Ultra doubles the level of zoom that the P30 Pro can achieve, the feature is more of a gimmick than anything else. I’ve used Huawei’s 50x zoom a handful of times and no more. S20 Ultra users will probably do the same. It’s in the software optimization where Samsung have a shot of overtaking Huawei and when the review units are out, we’ll be able to ascertain that for sure.

A huge number of megapixels are great and all, but as Apple has shown time and time again, megapixel count and physical sensor size don’t mean squat in this era of smartphone cameras. It really is all about how you optimize your camera.