Samsung finally confirms blurry S23, S23 Plus cameras, says a fix is coming

Some Samsung Galaxy S23 and S23 Plus owners noticed a rather frustrating “banana blur” issue earlier this year. More specifically, the users found a permanently out-of-focus area in photos taken with the 50MP main camera. This is especially noticeable when taking close-up shots.

Now, Samsung has acknowledged the issue in a Polish-language community post (as spotted by Redditor NoSeK2323), adding that a software update will address the problem.

The company explained the cause of the issue in the machine-translated post:

When testing the capabilities of the S23 or S23 Plus’s camera, you may have been caught by the fact that when you take a close-up photo, the area around the subject looks a bit blurry. That’s because the rear wide-angle camera on the S23 and S23 Plus has a bright aperture, which helps when taking photos in the dark. However, it also means that more noticeable selective focus can make the background of your photos look a bit blurry.

Samsung adds that it plans to address this problem in a future software update, without revealing a timeline for the patch. The company also issued a couple of “solutions,” which seem more like workarounds. One suggested workaround involves taking a step back if your subject is 30cm (~12 inches) away or even closer.

Meanwhile, the other touted solution calls for users to take a photo while holding the phone vertically. “If you hold your phone horizontally or obliquely, the background may appear blurry,” the company explains.

Either way, the issue was first discovered in March, so it’s taken a long time for the company to acknowledge it and confirm that a fix is in the works. But we hope a software update can indeed address this problem and that it’s not a hardware issue.