The Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra was announced today (hands-on here) with one new camera and a huge focus on improvements through AI.
Samsung didn’t seem interested in talking a whole lot about the technical specs of the Ultra’s cameras, but being the geeks that we are, we decided to take things into our own hands. If you have the camera’s EXIF data – focal length and aperture – just calculate its crop factor and with that, you have the sensor size.
Doing that, we have the camera sensor sizes on the Galaxy S24 Ultra. As usual, the wide-angle has the largest sensor at 1/1.33″. It pixel bins sixteen small 0.6µm pixels into one bigger 2.4µm one. The 12MP ultrawide doesn’t bin pixels and it has 1.12µm-sized photodiodes by default.
The 5x camera is the new one here and it’s sort of an enigma. We don’t know which sensor sits behind the 5x zoom camera, but we know it’s a 50MP unit and it has a 115mm f/3.4 lens. Rumor has it, it’s a Sony IMX854 – a 1/2.52″ imager with 0.7µm individual pixels. The calculated sensor size is 1/2.6″, but the 0.08 is well within the rounding margin error.
To put things into perspective, the Galaxy S24 Ultra has a 1/2.6″ 115mm long telephoto camera with an f/3.4 lens compared to the Apple iPhone 15 Pro Max’s 1/3.06″ 120mm with an f/2.8 lens. Comparing these two side by side would be quite interesting because one has a much bigger sensor, but the other has a brighter lens.
Finally, the 3x is the same old 69mm f/2.4 shooter with a lowly 1/3.6″ sensor.
| Aperture | Focal length | 35mm equivalent | Crop factor | Sensor size | |
| 0.6x | 2.2 | 2.2 | 13mm | 5.91 | 1/2.5″ |
| 1x | 1.7 | 6.3 | 23mm | 3.65 | 1/1.33″ |
| 3x | 2.4 | 7.9 | 69mm | 8.73 | 1/3.6″ |
| 5x | 3.4 | 18.6 | 115mm | 6.18 | 1/2.52″ |
With the number out of the way we’ll now have to see how well these cameras perform in real life – stay tuned for our full review!
