When we saw the recent unofficial renders of the Galaxy S11 recently, we and many others were a little surprised by how large the rear camera bump was. And now we have a better idea why it looks so big.
Ice Universe, a frequent and reliable leaker of information about upcoming smartphones, posted the following tweet, revealing what could be a genuine image of the Galaxy S11 Plus’ camera array.
This is the real Galaxy S11+ camera. On the left is the ultra-wide-angle, main camera, and periscope zoom lens. I don't know the exact distribution on the right. It is expected to include flash and ToF. pic.twitter.com/98exPMSqgfDecember 16, 2019
There’s little reason to doubt this tweet. The combination of these three cameras is fairly standard for modern smartphones, and it’s possible to tell just from the image in the tweet above that the bottom camera is a telephoto lens. The square shape of the opening allows for the insertion of a periscope mirror, allowing a greater optical zoom length without increasing the depth of the phone to impractical levels, like we’ve seen on the Huawei P30 Pro or the Oppo Reno 10x Zoom.
As Ice Universe writes, the other half of the camera bump most likely contains a time-of-flight sensor and the flash module. Considering the size, plus the fact that the S11 Plus will be the top-of-the-line model, we might also hope for more sensors, such as the rumored spectrometer for measuring the chemical makeup of certain objects like the sugar content of food.
A second Ice Universe tweet has us looking towards Samsung’s future cameras. You can read the full tweet and what look to be presentation slides below, but the bottom line is that Samsung is looking towards 144MP cameras.
Crazy, Samsung is planning to use a 14nm process to make 144MP sensors. pic.twitter.com/H9PvLUuqYYDecember 16, 2019
Not content with the 108MP Bright HMX sensor or the rumored modified version that will appear on the S11, Samsung is looking towards using sensors with smaller architecture to allow them to capture even higher resolution images.
We round up all the rumors and leaks we hear about the next Samsung phone in our Galaxy S11 rumors hub page, so take a look if you want to hear more about the phone’s features, availability and other key specs.
