Here's what Samsung Galaxy S26's modest camera tweaks actually mean

The Samsung Galaxy S26 family has been officially announced, and surprising no one, it’s a tame, iterative upgrade over the Galaxy S25 cohort, rather than a re-invention of the wheel.

Given the ongoing memory crisis, it’s nice that we’re getting new phones at all, and not skipping a generation à la Nothing’s strategy with its Phone 3 follow-up.

The new Galaxy S26 trio of smartphones — oh, sorry, “AI phones,” as Samsung insists on calling them now — pack mostly the same specs as last year, with a few new features and upgraded parts in a few small but key areas.

The standard model has grown a hair bigger, and the chipset has been replaced with a new one.

However, there’s one spec tweak that could be easy to overlook, and it’s one worth digging into since it will impact photography.

I’m talking about the improved lens aperture of the main camera of all three models, which could have a small but appreciated impact on the pictures you capture.

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By  Zach Gray-Traverso

What’s changed? And what is aperture?

No, not the company from Portal

The main camera on each Samsung Galaxy S26 model is now f/1.4, over the f/1.8 on the S25 models (except the S25 Ultra, which had f/1.7).

Yes, that’s the change I’m talking about: four-tenths of a number. But in the photography world, four-tenths can be a lot.

To people who aren’t up on their camera jargon, who care less about numbers and more about effects, this slight change to numbers might not mean a lot at first glance.

To briefly explain what these numbers mean, we have to look at what aperture is.

To simplify aperture (oversimplify it, perhaps — skip ahead, camera experts), it’s a term used to refer to the opening in a lens that lets in light.

It’s measured in f-stops, usually written as f/, with lower numbers denoting a wider opening. An f/2.8 aperture lens, then, is more open than an f/8.0 one, and the Galaxy S26 lenses are more open than the S25 ones are.

Given that photographs are just snapshots of light, this affects the picture you capture.

A wider aperture lets in more light, while a narrower one lets in less, and one or the other will be preferable depending on how well lit your subject is.

It’s just like how your eye’s pupil will expand or contract depending on how dark your location is.

There are a few other effects and considerations, like impacts on bokeh, sharpness and focus, and these all play with smartphone photography ... but they won’t be relevant to the points I’m about to make, so let’s forget them for now.

What does that mean for the Samsung Galaxy S26?

Brighter pictures, less noise

In digital photography, light is information. It’s not to you or I — for us, random facts about the Roman Empire are what pass as information — but to a smartphone camera, a greater amount of light means a larger paint-can of data with which to paint a picture.

A smartphone will take all the data captured when you press that shutter button, and hand it over to its ISP, or Image Signal Processor.

This basically acts like a brain, trained for one purpose: to turn that data into the picture that flashes up on your screen moments after the picture is taken.

It follows then, that if an aperture is bigger, and lets in more light, then that’s more data for the ISP to use. The resulting pictures will therefore be even better, as the machine will have more context for how a scene should look.

And that’s how it should work on the Samsung Galaxy S26: wider aperture, more light, better pictures.

In your pictures, that could manifest in a few ways.

Perhaps if you’re taking a shot in a low-lit room, the phone will be able to pick up more details in the darkest areas.

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If you’re photographing a colorful scene, it’ll be able to do an even better job reproducing the vibrancy.

If you’re photographing somewhere with high contrast (bright areas and dark ones, a tricky combo for a camera), the device might be able to capture more information from those darker areas.

Samsung listed a few areas in which the aperture will come in handy.

Nightography Video is a mode specifically for capturing photos and videos at night or in darker environments, and the company explained how one effect of the aperture is that it’ll greatly improve the mode’s denoising feature.

Noise is, to once again oversimplify a topic, that grainy-looking flickery effect that’s most noticeable in dark areas, when not enough data is captured to create an image.

Bigger aperture to capture more light? More information, less noise, in theory, though we’ll need to test the phone to be sure.

But given the number of wonderful Samsung Galaxy camera tricks that users need to know, there’s a good chance that the Nightography upgrades will be more of what fans love.