Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra camera deep dive: 200MP sensor and all shooting modes explained

The Galaxy S23 Ultra continues that trend by adding a 200MP main camera to a highly versatile system that already includes a sweeping ultra-wide shooter and not one but two zoom lenses. Along with all those extra pixels come new shooting modes, which add to the exhaustive list of camera features. If you feel overwhelmed with just how much this camera can do, we have you covered.

Camera hardware overview

Ever since the Galaxy S21 Ultra, Samsung's top dog slab phone has had the most versatile camera system on the market in terms of optical focal length, with an ultrawide camera that shoots an equivalent of 13mm and a 10x Periscope zoom lens producing an equivalent of a 230mm lens. The latter lens can actually digitally zoom up 100x, but images at that range are virtually unusable, but you can get up to 30x and images remain sharp, so essentially, the S23 Ultra system can shoot as wide as 13mm, and as long as nearly 700mm.

In terms of a hardware upgrade, only the main sensor got a bump from last year's S22 Ultra, with the previous 108MP camera upgraded to a new 200MP one using Samsung's new ISOCELL HP2 sensor. This sensor packs 200 million 0.6-micrometer (μm) pixels in a 1/1.3-inch optical sensor size. And like all recent smartphones, the sensor is mostly meant to shoot pixel-binned photos at either 12.5MP (using 16-in-1 binning) or 50MP (using 4-in-1 binning). There is an option to shoot full 200MP mode, but then you lose the benefits of pixel binning. We'll cover this in the camera software section.

The other lenses remain the same, so we have a 12MP, f/2.2 ultra-wide with a 1/2.55-inch sensor; 10MP f/2.4 portrait lens that can produce 3x optical zoom; and a 10MP f/4.9 Periscope zoom lens that can capture 10x optical zoom. The selfie camera actually got a downgrade (at least in terms of pixel count), going from a 40MP front-facing shooter in the S22 Ultra to a 12MP, f/2.2 front-facing camera.

Camera software overview: Different modes and what they do

Let's do a quick overview of all the different shooting modes before we circle back to focus on the new lens. Samsung's camera app remains mostly unchanged from the last few years and doesn't stray too far from other major manufacturers' camera apps (actually, every phone brand's camera apps are mostly similar except for Pixel's). You have a black background, with a white shutter button and an image viewfinder in the middle. Major shooting modes are cycled via horizontal swipes, with buttons above the viewfinder for settings. Samsung doesn't try to clutter the app with too many major modes to swipe through, by default offering only "Portrait," "Photo," "Video," and "More," in this order.

The "More" tab opens up a long list of additional shooting modes, and this is where things get overwhelming and unnecessarily convoluted. While the major shooting modes are self-explanatory and using them are as simple as pointing and shooting, the extra modes in "More" can be complicated or might even require additional downloads. For example, there's Expert RAW, which you need to download from Samsung's app store. I wrote a tutorial on Expert RAW a couple months back, and all the features still apply here, so check that article for a more in-depth breakdown.

The summarized version is that Expert RAW allows you to shoot in RAW image format, which is uncompressed and contains as much data as the camera sensor allows. A RAW image straight off the phone (or a real camera) usually doesn't look too visually appealing, with blown-out highlights and maybe odd colors. That's because the point of RAW photography is to give the photographer all the image information to make post-shot edits in software. Here, Expert RAW allows you to directly open images in the Adobe Lightroom Android app. Expert RAW did get a couple of new tricks for the S23 Ultra, which I'll circle back to after I run down all the shooting modes.

Then, there's Pro, which is essentially a less advanced version of Expert RAW. You can do things like adjust ISO, shutter speed, and focus points, while also adjusting color temperature before snapping that photo (see screenshots below). You can do all this in Expert RAW too, but Pro mode doesn't force you to shoot in RAW file — you can still shoot in conventional JPEG.

Then there's Pro Video, which is, as you can guess, Pro mode but for video. You can adjust things like focus and shutter speed in real-time and pull off cinematic tricks like rack focus. After that comes Night mode, which is mostly pointless because, by default, the standard Photo mode already turns on night mode automatically when your surroundings get dark enough. The only benefit of here is being able to shoot with a longer exposure, which you can still do in Pro or Expert RAW modes.

Then there's Food and Panorama. The former is another useless mode that doesn't do much (it dials up the contrast of your food shots). But Panorama is fun to play with, allowing you to shoot sweeping, wide images.

Then there's Super Slow-mo and Slow Motion, which do the same thing except at different frame rates. Hypelapse is Samsung's term for time-lapse, and it does its job of capturing mesmerizing time-lapse videos. Portrait Video is video mode with artificial bokeh around the subject. Virtually every phone offers this now, and it's a quick toggle in the main video mode, but Samsung decided to make it a separate mode. Portrait Video mode works quite well though, producing somewhat convincing fake bokeh, and other fun things like isolating colors of certain subjects or providing a glitch effect.

Director's View is another fun mode, allowing you to film video clips using one of the rear-facing cameras and a selfie camera simultaneously. You resize the windows to make the selfie part smaller or larger, and can also preview three rear-facing cameras (wide, 3x, 10x) in real-time. It's unknown why ultrawide was excluded.

Finally, there's Single Take. This is supposed to let you just press the shutter once and wave the camera around for a few seconds. Then, Samsung's software will produce a series of photos and videos you can choose from. Often, the footage captured is just not good. And it's not just me. I don't know a single reviewer who has said good things about this mode.

What can that 200MP sensor do?

As mentioned earlier, the main point of this new 200MP sensor is to allow the Galaxy S23 Ultra to shoot pixel-binned photos. Binning is a software trick that allows smartphones to overcome their relatively small sensor size by combining multiple pixels' worth of data into one, forming a "super pixel," so to speak. By default, S23 Ultra's 200MP camera produces 12MP photos, usually between 3MB to 5MB in size. Shooting in 50MP bumps file sizes to around 11MB or 12MB, and bumping up to full 200MP results in file sizes between 25MB to 30MB.

Shooting in 12MP is usually ideal — it is the default mode for a reason — because it has the fastest shutter speed, the image processes almost instantly, and you get the fullest extent of Samsung's computational trickery. If you're shooting in challenging lighting conditions like low light or against backlight, shooting in 12MP will get you the best dynamic range and exposure.

In the images above and below, I've placed a standard 12MP shot next to a 200MP photo. You should be able to see the 200MP image blowing out highlights such as the neon light sign and windows.

However, the benefit of shooting in 200MP is the image's default size is much larger, hence allowing you to zoom into (or crop into) a photo without losing as many details. In the below images, I cropped into both photos at roughly the same scale. You can see the 200MP image is sharper and more detailed.

But shooting in 200MP mode requires you to wait a few seconds for the image to finish snapping, as well as another few seconds to open the image file for the first time due to the large file size. It can be a helpful trick when you're shooting a scene with a lot of objects and want to have the option to crop in to examine later.

As for the 50MP mode, it's the happy medium of the two. You still get some benefits of pixel binning (which the 200MP shot does not), and the image will still be larger than the 12MP shot, so you can still crop in a bit better. But there's still a slight wait before the image finishes snapping, so ultimately, the 12MP mode is the one you want to use over 90% of the time.

New Nightography modes

The Expert RAW mode brings a couple of new Nightography modes, including astrophotography and a "star trail" recording feature. In Astrophotography, you must set the phone on a tripod since it requires at least four minutes to capture an image. Samsung even built a star guide into the mode that will project a star map onto the sky so you know what you're shooting.

Star trail recording is a time-lapse mode that captures the stars moving in slow motion. I have been on the road in cities with a lot of noise pollution (Hong Kong and London) so I haven't tried this myself, but XDA's Mobile Editor Chris Wedel has and loves it.

Other shooting modes, such as using the front-facing selfie camera or portrait mode, remain unchanged from the last several years of Samsung devices, so I think we can skip those. Overall, the Galaxy S23 Ultra has one of the most robust camera systems around, and the software, while over-complicated at times, allows you to do a lot — more than you could with an iPhone or a Pixel.

If you're in the market for a new phone and the camera experience is important to you, the Galaxy S23 Ultra is one of the absolute best options around. I'm not ready to call it the best yet, because I think that the 1-inch Sony IMX989 sensor in the Vivo X90 Pro+ captures stronger still photos, but I will do more testing and write a camera comparison between those two beasts in the coming weeks. But considering the X90 Pro+ isn't available for sale outside China, the Galaxy S23 Ultra will be it for most people.