This just in: Behold a cropped-in Galaxy S23 Ultra camera sample

This time around, we’re treated to a camera sample. But wait, this isn’t your ordinary regular camera sample, it’s a 12X crop out of the main 200MP HP2 camera sensor that will debut inside the Galaxy S23 Ultra in roughly ten days’ time, on February 1. 

Normally, if you wish to capture a regular photo with the same framing on any of Samsung’s previous Ultras, the camera would have intelligently switched over to the 10X optical zoom periscope lens already, improving the sharpness and level of detail. However, this doesn’t seem to be the case in this situation—the regular camera was used to take a photo, and then it was zoomed in 12X times to this specific area.

In a follow-up tweet, Ice Universe reiterates his impression that “HP2 200MP photos look completely different from HP1, HP3 and HM1, HM3, and they are hardly sharpened, so the photos look delicate and natural, without too many traces of processing.” Surely, we could have judged this by ourselves if we were given the full photo sample, but alas, the leaksverse works in mysterious ways, and we don’t tend to look a gifted horse in the mouth! 

Samsung’s Galaxy S23 Ultra is getting a 200MP main camera, utilizing the 1/1.13″ ISOCELL HP2 sensor with F1.7 aperture and quad phase detection, a big hardware change over the previous 108MP camera sensor that made an appearance inside the Galaxy S22 Ultra. The camera sensor certainly employs advanced pixel-binning (you can’t expect to capture 200MP shots by default) utilizing a so-called Tetra2Pixel technology, which merges sixteen pixels into one at 2.4μm during regular shooting conditions, but 50MP 1.2μm photos in low-light conditions that merge four adjacent pixels into one.