- Samsung has announced a new kind of telephoto camera design
- It helps telephoto cameras combine bright apertures with slim designs
- This is particularly beneficial for low-light portrait photos
The world’s best camera phones have improved their telephoto cameras greatly in the past few years, but Samsung has just revealed a new technology that could boost their performance while keeping its phones acceptably slim.
Announced in a blog post on Samsung’s Semiconductor website (spotted by Android Authority), the so-called ‘ALoP’ technology reshuffles the layout of Samsung’s current periscope camera design.
The main benefit is creating space for lenses with brighter maximum apertures (which theoretically means less noise in low light) without increasing the size of the camera bump. Currently, the lenses inside Samsung’s ‘folded’ telephoto camera module sit vertically in line with the phone’s body. The downside of this setup is that adding a wider lens makes the camera bump thicker.
Instead, the ‘ALoP’ (or ‘All Lenses on Prism’) system places the lenses horizontally (much like a traditional camera lens) to the rear of the phone, with the prism then reflecting that light up to the camera sensor. This means a wider, brighter lens could be added without making the phone feel like a ridiculous Energizer phone.
Still, while that is a promising development, we shouldn’t expect physics-busting miracles. Samsung says the ‘ALoP’ system creates enough room for an f/2.58 aperture at a focal length of 80mm.
That’s a 3x telephoto camera and a fairly bright one at that, beating the f/2.8 aperture of Apple‘s 77mm telephoto in the iPhone 15, but still well short of the finest f/1.2 portrait lenses seen on the best professional cameras. Still, as Samsung says, the system would still promise “low-noise portrait images in night shots”, which is one of the most popular photographic genres for smartphones.
Room for two periscopes?
Given the apparent space savings of Samsung’s ‘ALoP’ design, a more radical improvement could be the inclusion of two periscope telephoto cameras in a future Galaxy phone.
Earlier this year, the Oppo Find X7 Ultra became the first phone to offer dual periscope cameras – and while the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra is expected to pack in both a 3x telephoto and 5x telephoto, this new design could create enough space for some even more impressive optics.
There’s a strong argument that a good 3x telephoto camera is more useful for most people than the 5x or 10x options we’ve seen in recent years. A 3x lens has a focal length that’s somewhere in the 75mm-80mm range, which is where a lot of pros shoot portraits – the focal length creates natural bokeh while still being relatively flattering to subjects.
So if Samsung can improve the quality of its 3x periscope systems with this new ‘ALoP’ system, while leaving enough room for the inclusion of those longer 5x or 10x telephoto cameras, it could create a well-rounded camera phone with few weaknesses.
Samsung calls ALoP a “future telephoto camera solution” with no hints of an expected launch date, but the publication of the info suggests we could see it in a 2025 phone.
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mark.wilson@futurenet.com (Mark Wilson)
