Huawei P40 Pro Plus vs Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra - Super zoom battle! - Android

Smartphone cameras have improved a ton over the last couple of years. Sensors have gotten bigger and processing has gotten better. Amid fierce competition, one spec that manufacturers have consistently tried to best each other on is zoom.

Earlier this year, Samsung introduced the Galaxy S20 Ultra. It had a huge 5,000mAh battery, an enormous 6.9-inch display, and a beefy 108MP camera sensor. While most of these specs are impressive in their own right, the spec Samsung really wanted to push was the S20 Ultra’s 100x zoom capabilities.

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While images at 100x are barely viewable, it’s still an impressive feat to get this much reach on a phone. Samsung uses a combination of the 4x optical telephoto lens, information from the 108MP camera, and a lot of cropping to zoom that far in. Since the release of the Ultra, no manufacturer had been able to best it — until the Huawei P40 Pro Plus came around, that is.

The Huawei P40 Pro Plus also sports 100x zoom capabilities, but it has something the Galaxy S20 Ultra doesn’t: a 10x optical telephoto lens. This means it only needs to use hybrid zoom and cropping in the range from 10x-100x, vs 4x-100x on the Ultra, which adds to overall sharpness and detail. But how do these phones compare in the real world? Let’s take a look at the camera capabilities of the Huawei P40 Pro Plus vs Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra.

The 100X factor

As you can see from the examples above, both devices are very good at 1x and 10x zoom, but the P40 Pro Plus is definitely sharper, with text and detail appearing more legible. The P40 Pro Plus definitely producer darker images though, with the whites not popping nearly as much, especially in the 10x zoom image.

Zoom in to 100x, and the difference is even more clear. Samsung needs to apply a lot of noise reduction in order to keep images looking decent. This often produced halos around elements like text. The P40 Pro Plus clearly isn’t perfect. Images still look quite soft at maximum zoom, but the text is much more legible, and contrast is much better at this range.