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Samsung’s Galaxy S20 Ultra wasn’t the first phone to feature a periscopic telephoto lens — both Huawei and Oppo beat the Korean company to it — but it was the first in the US to make such a big deal about it. Almost all of Samsung’s marketing for the S20 Ultra centered on its so-called Space Zoom, its 5x optical folded periscope lens, capable of digitally zooming much further. Samsung even wrote “Space Zoom 100x” on the back of the phone itself, just in case you forgot.
That phone sparked a strong reaction from some. Many questioned why you’d ever need a camera that zoomed so far you could look inside the top windows of a skyscraper; some suggested it would only ever be used by perverts and voyeurs; others simply pointed out that almost every photo taken at 100x zoom sucked. Samsung and its competitors learned from some of that criticism and mostly stopped talking about 100x zoom, focusing on better quality shots from shorter distances in future marketing material.
What manufacturers didn’t stop was competing on telephoto cameras in the first place. Apple introduced its first iPhone with a 3x telephoto, the 13 Pro, in 2021 (though wouldn’t get a true periscope until another two years later). That same year, Google added a 48-megapixel, 4x periscopic telephoto to its Pixel 6 Pro, while Samsung jumped to a 10x telephoto on its S21 Ultra, a feat Huawei had already achieved a year earlier. Along with the longer zooms, companies began to add larger sensors, faster apertures, and more pixels in an effort to win the arms race.
Cameras have long been a source of fierce competition between smartphone manufacturers and for good reason: a 2023 YouGov survey found that more than half of US flagship phone buyers see photo quality as an important factor when picking a phone, with battery life the only feature to be ranked significantly more important. They’ve only become more important as other specs have become more homogenous. Almost every Android phone now offers a chipset from one of two manufacturers, similar RAM and storage specs, and a 120Hz OLED display somewhere between six and seven inches in size. Cameras offer room to be different, from outlandish lens module designs to high resolution sensors, with meaningful variation in photo quality, color science, and exposure.
Telephoto cameras have become a particular focus for the simple reason that most main cameras have gotten too good. An affordable Android handset will now take excellent photos in almost any lighting — even low light, once the ground for fierce OEM rivalries, is now essentially a solved problem. Selfie and ultrawide cameras are similarly capable, while typically attracting a lot less interest in the finer details of their photo quality. But people still associate telephotos with grainy images of far-off buildings, leaving plenty of room for manufacturers to find improvements and make their mark.
Phone manufacturers are now turning to more and more extravagant hardware setups in order to gain an advantage.
Vivo has chased higher resolutions, introducing a 200-megapixel telephoto in its X100 Ultra, since adopted by Honor, Xiaomi, and more. Samsung is one of several brands to include two telephoto lenses on a single phone, each offering a different zoom. Sony tried to one-up the competition with continuous optical zoom on its Xperia 1 IV. Xiaomi just resurrected that idea for its 17 Ultra, going a step further by introducing a rotatable zoom ring on the camera island. Last year’s Huawei Pura 80 Ultra put two telephoto lenses on top of a single sensor, with a movable prism to direct the light from the appropriate lens, allowing space for a larger sensor than other phones.
The latest wave of competition has stepped beyond the phone itself. Vivo was first to offer a telephoto extender for its X200 Ultra, an add-on lens that mounts onto the phone with the help of a special case, producing 8.7x optical zoom from a lens the length of a Coke can. Predictably enough, others followed suit, with Oppo and Honor among the companies offering near-identical extender lenses — though a handful of third-party manufacturers have offered similar add-on lenses for years.
Increasingly, manufacturers have taken to heart that longer isn’t always better. Recent Ultra flagships from Vivo, Oppo, and Xiaomi have dropped back to shorter 3-4x optical zooms, distances that make them practical choices for portrait photos and product shots. Larger sensors and faster apertures mean they capture more light than older telephotos, perform better at night, and produce natural bokeh without a dedicated portrait mode. When I’m using one of these phones, I now find myself shooting the overwhelming majority of photos using the telephoto cameras, which tend to offer more attractive framing and depth to shots than the flat, wide main cameras. Telephotos aren’t only better than ever — they’re increasingly the best cameras on a phone, period.
For now, expect the arms race to continue. We’ll likely see imitators of Xiaomi’s updated take on continuous zoom and Huawei’s alternating lenses, while more traditional telephotos keep getting bigger sensors and wider apertures. There’ll be more add-on lenses, likely getting longer, larger, and probably with their own continuous zoom capabilities too.
One obvious growth area is AI zoom. Smartphones have used machine learning to enhance digital zoom for years, but we’re now seeing generative AI applied for the same effect, most notably in the Pixel 10 series’ Pro Res Zoom. It raises the usual questions around what a photo actually is, with Google smartly disabling the feature when faces are in frame, heading some problems off at the pass. Still, with the RAM crisis driving costs up across the board, expect manufacturers to jump at new ways to enhance photos with software, rather than ever more expensive hardware components.
Low light photos are still one area where many telephotos can’t compete with main cameras. Sensors and apertures are smaller, and stabilization is trickier for the delicate periscopic setups, making it harder to get results when the light gets low. Serious improvement has been made in the last year or two though, and I expect it to continue.
After that, all bets are off. We’re getting close to the point of diminishing returns on telephoto lenses, at least outside of the 100x zoom photos that few photographers ever actually take. Component costs mean Ultra phone telephotos still have a real edge over those in regular flagships or cheaper phones, but the moment that changes, manufacturers will have to find a new race to run.
- Apple is taking the contest in a novel direction by claiming that its different digital focal lengths are equivalent to telephoto lenses. That means even the iPhone Air’s single physical lens nets you “a total of four lenses in your pocket.”
- If you want to be particular about it, “zoom” and “telephoto” aren’t interchangeable. A zoom lens is one that can move between different focal lengths, while a telephoto is any with a sufficiently long focal length. Very few smartphones have true zoom lenses, many have telephotos.
- Digital Camera World has a good introductory explanation of how periscope lenses work, and some of the physical limitations of the format.
- GSMArena’s fun rundown of the early days of optical zoom in feature phones and the first smartphones, including some truly wild designs.
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