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How it started
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.
Enormous camera islands like the Xiaomi 15 Ultra’s have become commonplace in Android flagships, with much of that space devoted to the periscope lens. Photo: Dominic Preston / The Verge
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.
How it’s going
Phone manufacturers are now turning to more and more extravagant hardware setups in order to gain an advantage.
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