This article is part of a directory: Mobile Photography Week 2023: Our big phone camera celebration
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Megapixel counts on Samsung's best phones have ballooned into the hundreds, with the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra sporting a 200-megapixel primary camera. By default, though, that phone takes 12.5-megapixel photos, much the same way the Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra defaults to 12-megapixel shots. But why is that? What's the point of all those megapixels if the cameras still kick out average-size pictures?

Banner with the AP logo in black along with a black and gray smartphone. The text "Mobile Photography Week" appears horizontally and a "2023 flag is diagonally positioned in the right corner.

What does resolution mean for photos?

Digital camera sensors are covered in thousands and thousands of tiny, discrete light sensors, or pixels. A higher resolution means more pixels on the sensor. The more pixels a sensor packs into the same physical area, the smaller those pixels must be. Because smaller pixels have less surface area, they can't gather as much light as larger pixels, which means crummy low-light performance. High-megapixel phone cameras typically employ pixel binning to get around this.

An illustration of the process of 9-to-1 pixel binning.

It's technical, but in a nutshell, pixel binning bins groups of individual pixels into artificially larger pixels, boosting how much light data the sensor can collect when you press the shutter button. In the case of the Galaxy S22 Ultra, groups of nine pixels are binned, which is how 108 megapixels translates to 12 (108 ÷ 9 = 12).

How to take full-resolution photos on the Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra

Unlike the Google Pixel 7 and Pixel 7 Pro, which have 50-megapixel primary camera sensors that always kick out 12.5-megapixel photos, the S22 Ultra gives you the option to take unbinned, full-resolution shots using the stock camera app.

Setting the S22 Ultra's camera to shoot in full resolution takes two taps. With the camera app open, tap the aspect ratio icon in the top toolbar, then select 3:4 108MP.

Access to telephoto and ultrawide cameras is restricted when you enable full-res shooting, though you can still zoom (digitally) by pinching in on the viewfinder.

To go back to regular shooting, tap the aspect ratio icon again and select 3:4.

Comparing photos with and without pixel binning

Are you interested to see how binned and unbinned images stack up? We took a few photos with binning off and on to illustrate the differences in low-light performance.

In each of these sets of images, the first photo was taken without pixel binning and the second photo was taken with pixel binning. (The unbinned photo samples have also been resized from 108 to 12 megapixels.)

Below, we see some image quality improvement in the second photo, which was captured with pixel binning. There's not much difference in terms of noise, but if you look closely, the lines are more defined in the second photo. The edges in the first unbinned shot look a little ragged if you crop in, particularly in the shadows toward the lower-right corner.

In this next set — captured in a very dark indoor setting — the unbinned shot (first) is darker and noisier than the binned shot (second), even without cropping to pixel-peep. Neither looks good, but it was very dark here.

Same story with the images below. The first photo is dramatically different from the second. The first, captured in full 108-megapixel resolution (which has been downsized to 12 megapixels), is noisier than the one taken seconds later with the S22 Ultra's default settings.

The photos below were taken in a dark room against a dark-colored wall and show the most dramatic difference we saw in our testing. The first image, captured without pixel binning and at 108 megapixels (downsized here to 12), is noisier than the second, which was taken with the S22 Ultra's default settings. Ironically, some detail is also lost at 108 megapixels. The text near the lower-right corner of the poster (that says "Nashville, Tennessee") is illegible in the first photo.

Do we really need all these pixels?

Pixel binning is important for the physically tiny, high-resolution camera sensors shipping in many Android phones because it helps them make sense of particularly dark scenes. It's a trade-off. Resolution is cut drastically, but light sensitivity increases. Huge megapixel counts also give you the flexibility to zoom with software when shooting 8K video, though that's not a use case that most people will benefit from for many years. And it's also part marketing. A 108-megapixel camera looks more impressive on a spec sheet than a 12-megapixel one, even if they're the same most of the time.

Based on our experience, it seems to take a very dark setting for binning to matter much, at least on the S22 Ultra in particular. In every example where we saw a big difference, the scene was so dark that most people probably wouldn't have thought to take a photo in the first place. On the other hand, shooting at the Ultra's full 108 megapixels doesn't often wring much more usable detail out of the scene, even in good light. Leaving the phone at its 12-megapixel default yields a better experience most of the time, regardless of lighting.

Boost your photography skills up a notch

Want to dig deeper into mobile photography? Check out our guide to Samsung Expert RAW, a flexible pro camera app for Samsung phones, plus how to edit raw photos on your phone.