The Samsung Galaxy S III was released in May 2012, ten years ago. The S series has evolved significantly over the past decade and we wanted to try and quantify that evolution. Since there’s a lot to cover, we figured we should keep it simple and focus on the camera today.
The third generation S-phone arrived with a single 8MP camera on the back and a 1.9MP selfie camera on the front. This was before the days of multi-camera setups, OIS and so on.
In fact, the OIS wouldn’t appear until 2015 and the Galaxy S6. Then in 2018 the Galaxy S9 + introduced the first telephoto lens to the series, the following year’s Galaxy S10 5G added an ultra wide angle camera.
The best Samsung Galaxy S phones from 2012 to 2022
A quick note: the Galaxy S10 + also had an ultrawide camera, but we’re just looking at the best model of each generation. And in 2019 it was the S10 5G, which added 3D ToF sensors on the front and rear. It didn’t last long and Samsung eventually went back to the computational approach to measuring distance to objects. Another short-lived feature was the double aperture – the Galaxy S8 + and S9 + could switch between f / 2.0 for daytime shots to f / 1.5 at night.
These two are responsible for another short-lived trend, the iris scanner on the front. This was used for biometric authentication, but was dropped in the S10 generation when in-display fingerprint readers became available.
The next year came the first Galaxy S phone with a periscope (the Galaxy S4’s zoom doesn’t matter – it wasn’t a periscope-style lens, and if we’re honest, it was more of a camera than a phone).
The Galaxy S20 Ultra had a periscope with a focal length of 103mm or 4x optical magnification. It was double what previous telephoto lenses offered, but created too much space for the main sensor to fill with digital zoom. So with the Galaxy S21 Ultra forward, Samsung used both a standard telephoto lens (now at 3x) and a periscope.
There is a lot of data to cover, even for the camera alone, so we’ve put it all into one table to summarize the evolution of the Galaxy S series over the past decade and have included some graphs to visualize the progress.
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