The best phone camera specs go to Galaxy S21 Ultra, Samsung renders confirm

Needless to say, we are most interested in the S21 Ultra kit, as the S21 and S21+ sets stay largely unchanged from what’s on the S20 or S20+, while the S21 Ultra pulls a Huawei P40 Pro+ with not one but two zoom cameras, one periscope and one telephoto.

• 12MP vs 12 MP vs 108MP main sensors
• 12MP vs 12MP vs 12MP ultrawide camera lens sensors
• 64MP vs 64MP vs 10MP 10x periscope/3x telephoto zoom cameras
• 10MP vs 10MP vs 40MP front camera sensors

Don’t be fooled, the high 64MP megapixel count of the Galaxy S21 or S21+ zoom camera is nothing to admire, as the S21 Ultra has not one but two zoom cameras, one of which has 10x periscope zoom, and the other 3x telephoto range, just like Huawei’s P40 Pro+, so it covers all bases. The Galaxy S21+, just like the S20+ before it, doesn’t have a periscope or telephoto zoom camera.

It simply crops from the high-res 64MP secondary sensor, and Samsung itself admits that what it calls a “telephoto camera” actually sports a lens that is very much wide-angle, almost as wide as the lens on the main camera. 

The “telephoto” lens only provides a 1.06 zoom compared to the regular camera, so all the zooming is actually almost entirely based on software – cropping and merging with the information from the main and/or ultrawide sensors. 

The end results are pretty good anyway, but it’s not even a true telephoto not to mention the 10x periscope zoom of the S21 Ultra that will resurrect Samsung’s “Space Zoom” term that went missing on the Note 20 Ultra.