The Samsung Galaxy S III was released in May 2012 – ten years ago. The S series has grown significantly over the past decade, and since we have a lot to hide and want to try to measure that evolution today, we thought we should keep it simple and focus on the camera.
The third generation of the S phone came with a single 8-megapixel camera at the back and a 1.9-megapixel selfie camera on the front. Multiple Camera Systems, OIS and this was several days ago.
In fact, it does not appear until OIS 2015 and Galaxy S6. Then in 2018, the Galaxy S9+ series brought the first telephoto lens, and the following year the Galaxy S10 5G Ultra White camera was added.
Best Samsung Galaxy S phones from 2012 to 2022
A quick note – the Galaxy S10+ has a UV camera, but we’re only seeing the best model for each generation. In 2019, it was the S10 5G that added 3D ToF sensors on the front and back. It didn’t last long and Samsung eventually turned to the computational approach to measuring the distance to things. Another short-lived feature is the dual aperture – the Galaxy S8+ and S9+ can convert daytime shots between f/2.0 to f/1.5 at night.
Both are responsible for another short-term trend of the iris scanner in the foreground. It was used for biometric authentication, but was dropped in the S10 generation due to the availability of fingerprint readers under the screen.
The following year, the first Galaxy S phone came with Periscope (like the Galaxy S4 Zoom can’t count – it’s not a Periscope-style lens, frankly, it’s more a camera than a phone).
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The Galaxy S20 Ultra has a telescope with a focal length of 103mm or 4x optical zoom. That’s twice as much as previous telephoto lenses, but it created more room for the main sensor to fill with digital zoom. So with the Galaxy S21 Ultra forward, Samsung used both a standard telephoto lens (now 3x) and a periscope.
To sum up the evolution of the Galaxy S series over the past 10 years, even the camera has a lot of data to cover, and we’ve added some charts to show the progress.