Samsung’s 200MP sensor has one very clever new video trick for the S24 Ultra

An iPhone 15 Pro-trumping feature?

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Samsunghas restarted the megapixel war by revealing some new camera features for its 200MP image sensor – and one standout trick that could give theSamsung Galaxy S24 Ultrabragging rights over theiPhone 15 Pro, for video at least.

The new feature, called ISOCELL Zoom Anyplace, uses the considerable resolution of Samsung’s 200MP sensor and the grunt ofQualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 3to let you simultaneously shoot a wide field of view with a zoomed-in tracking shot of a person or subject.

Samsung is keen to stress that this feature isn’t just digitally cropping into your image – instead, it uses what Samsung calls “in-sensor zoom” to maintain video resolution and detail. LikeGoogle’s Super Res Zoom technique, the cropped area of the sensor is remosaiced (or reinterpreted), letting you capture smaller sections of your scene in4Kresolution.

Combine this with automatic subject tracking, powered by Qualcomm’s AI engine, and you have a potentially powerful video mode that could give you alternative shots and angles, without needing to sacrifice your wider composition.

This idea isn’t entirely new. TheSony ZV-E1recently arrived with an Auto Framing feature, that gives you three different crops of the full image area and tracks a subject as they move around the frame.

We’ve also seen Honor introduce a Solo Cut Mode, while theFilmic Pro app’s DoubleTake featurealso pioneered the idea of multi-cam shooting from a phone (albeit using different cameras, rather than sensor crops).

But the Zoom Anyplace feature still certainly looks like a versatile, user-friendly implementation of the concept. The only question is which phone it’ll come to first, but we have a good idea – the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra is expected to have a 200MP sensor and the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, so it’ll almost certainly be the one to debut this feature when it launches in January or February 2024.

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Analysis: Video is the next battleground

Mirrorless cameras have offered on-sensor crop modes, as opposed to digital zoom, for a while now, and these techniques do generally offer better image quality than more straightforward digital crops.

But the results also aren’t necessarily ‘lossless’ and it remains to be seen how well ISOCELL Zoom Anyplace works in practice. In reality, it’ll likely produce better results in well-lit environments, so don’t necessarily expect it to be a pro multi-cam setup at your next concert.

Still, this ability to ‘zoom’ into photos and videos while maintaining resolution was one of the main reasons why the iPhone moved up to a 48MP sensor (after years at 12MP resolution), and this use case for the 200MP resolution of Samsung’s sensor is an interesting one given the continued interest in thebest YouTube cameras.

Photos at 200MP are less useful, but Samsung is also promising speedier processing for those thanks to another new feature called End-to-End (E2E) AI Remosaic. In short, this allows the remosaicing and image signal processing to occur simultaneously, rather than one after the other, so reducing the frustratingly slow shooting time of 200MP snaps.

It certainly sounds like the fight for the title ofbest camera phonein 2024 is going to be just as feisty as this year.

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Mark is TechRadar’s Senior news editor. Having worked in tech journalism for a ludicrous 17 years, Mark is now attempting to break the world record for the number of camera bags hoarded by one person. He was previously Cameras Editor at both TechRadar and Trusted Reviews, Acting editor on Stuff.tv, as well as Features editor and Reviews editor on Stuff magazine. As a freelancer, he’s contributed to titles including The Sunday Times, FourFourTwo and Arena. And in a former life, he also won The Daily Telegraph’s Young Sportswriter of the Year. But that was before he discovered the strange joys of getting up at 4am for a photo shoot in London’s Square Mile.

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