Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra – YES! FINALLY

One of the coolest camera features on the Galaxy S23 Ultra and literally every smartphone out there is portrait mode. It makes your subject pop and can give your pictures a dramatic look. Basically, when you take a photo, it keeps the subject in focus while making the background of the picture look artistically out of focus. This popular effect replicates photos taken on a mirrorless or DSLR camera with a long lens and a shallow depth of field.

Now, as you can probably tell, the portrait mode is my favorite camera feature, I take the majority of photos using this mode but if there’s one complaint I have with the portrait mode on the S23 Ultra is its versatility. You see, in portrait mode on the S23 Ultra, sometimes the unzoomed main camera can feel a little too wide and the 3x lens can feel a little too tight. Say you’re taking a picture of someone sitting across a table from you. With the 3x lens, you’ll get a lovely view of their eyes and nostrils and not much else. At 1x, you’re getting a lot of your surroundings in the background.

That can be really nice, too, but sometimes you want to put more focus on the person. That’s when 2x is the real Goldilocks option. We have a 2x portrait mode on the iPhone 14 Pro Max and even the Pixel 7 Pro but for some reason, Samsung didn’t enable it on the Galaxy S23 Ultra. Portrait photos especially when zoomed in look great so the fact that the S23 Ultra doesn’t have a 2x mode means that Samsung fans were missing out on some functionality that we take for granted on competing devices.

Thankfully, Samsung is about to change that. A Samsung moderator has officially confirmed that the ability to take portrait photos at 2x zoom would arrive with the next update. Samsung has added a 2x zoom mode to its camera app, and all it does is use the central portion of the main camera sensor to crop in and mimic the effect of a 48mm-equivalent telephoto lens. This may not sound like a big deal but if you use portrait mode often then you know that it is a big deal. It will arrive in June and it’s a pretty big one at 1.5GB. Portrait mode isn’t the only thing getting improved, Samsung is also addressing the HDR vignetting issues that have plagued some S23 Ultra cameras since the launch.

The vignetting is mostly visible while capturing low-light pictures. But Samsung will fix it with this update. Not only that, but the update will also optimize the performance of the camera for third-party applications notably the quality of third-party video calls will be more clear. As I’ve said, the update will arrive in June. With that said the Galaxy S24 Ultra will bring this premium feature back that was last seen on the S21 Ultra.