Testing the Galaxy S26 Plus at night exposes flagship smartphone cameras' biggest mistake

When shopping for the best camera phones in the business, we’re increasingly spoilt for choice, with the best flagships offering multi-sensor setups with huge megapixel counts, wide apertures, long-range zoom, and swathes of other flagship-tier camera technologies. However, move away from the very top-of-the-line camera phones, and it’s all too common to see that slightly cheaper flagships and mid-range phones are stuck with far less sophisticated camera arrays.

The Pixel 11 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro are good exceptions to this trend because they share the same hardware as their even more expensive XL and Max siblings, though the regular Pixel 11 and iPhone 17 miss out on some features. The same can’t be said for Samsung’s Galaxy S26 Plus, however, which is a pale imitation of the Ultra. I’ve been dabbling back in with Samsung’s flagship phones in recent weeks and was having trouble putting my finger on exactly why the Plus felt like such a mediocre camera package — until I took another look at the spec sheet.

The main sensor, for example, shrinks from 1/1.3-inch in the Ultra to 1/1.56-inch in the Plus. That’s certainly not a tiny sensor, but it is smaller than the iPhone 17 Pro’s 1/1.28-inch model and the Pixel 11 Pro’s 1/1.3-inch primary shooter. My rough math suggests that the Ultra’s larger sensor has about a 40% larger area for light capture, which undoubtedly adds up. Perhaps worse still, both Samsung’s flagships have a minuscule 1/3.94-inch 3x telephoto that Samsung often won’t even let you use when the light goes down, leaving you with upscales from the main sensor.

Unfortunately, I don’t have both Samsung’s latest Plus and Ultra to compare side by side, but I do have the OPPO Find X9 Ultra, which boasts a 1/1.12-inch main camera and a large 1/1.28-inch 3x periscope sensor. This makes the Galaxy S26 Plus look rather meager by comparison, but let’s see what difference this hardware actually makes to a few very low-light snaps.

The Galaxy S26 Plus proves the importance of large camera sensors

For the first snap, I grabbed a barely illuminated scene with both night modes enabled and disabled. Hopefully, you can see just how dark the scene is, but the larger image sensor of the OPPO already helps capture more detail and more vivid colors, even before resorting to a longer exposure. Flicking night mode on clearly improves light capture on both phones, but it’s worth noting that the Galaxy S26 Plus required a four-second exposure instead of three, leaving more time for shake and motion to ruin your low-light pictures. Even with the added exposure time, the Galaxy S26 Plus suffers from far more noise and worse dynamic range, with crushed shadows and washed-out colors.

Looking closer at the level of detail, or lack thereof, reveals more differences. Both phones are clearly struggling, but the Find X9 Ultra still manages to make some textures and patterns visible, while the Galaxy S26 Plus is mostly overly denoised on close inspection. I’m not saying the OPPO is brilliant here, but it clearly has the lead, in part thanks to its better hardware.

I also attempted to photograph the clear night sky and obtained similar results. Again, neither is flawless — I’d take some classic ISO grain over this denoised, sharpened appearance. Again, though, there are clearly dynamic range issues with the Galaxy, resulting in blotchy patches and color warping across the field of view. While both were good enough to capture the stars, OPPO’s image looks most like a dark night scene.

For my final test, I wanted to see how Samsung’s tiny telephoto lens compared to OPPO’s huge equivalent. I wasn’t expecting much of a contest, and neither was Samsung, it turns out. The S26 Plus wouldn’t actually let me take a picture with the 3x lens for the drinks bottle shot, automatically reverting to a crop from the 1x lens. Even when the viewfinder temporarily engaged the zoom camera, the phone never captured with it — even when I pressed the shutter while it was engaged. The results speak for themselves; there’s more detail preserved in the OPPO’s image than in Samsung’s.

I was finally able to engage Samsung’s 3x telephoto camera with a few more direct light sources in the frame, but this didn’t help the situation. The tiny sensor’s limited dynamic range becomes painfully apparent in low light, producing smudged details, noise, and a lack of any meaningful color saturation. OPPO’s result again isn’t perfectly clean, but the output is at least generally true to how the scene looked. When it comes to zoom, there’s no contest here; the biggest sensor is far superior.

Bigger cameras are still often better

These few samples I captured above are obviously extreme cases of low-light photography, but they highlight the difference between good and brilliant flagship camera phones at the top end of the market. Today’s best camera phones should offer a balanced level of quality across all their lenses, not just one or two. Having an ultrawide or telephoto zoom lens that takes nice-looking pictures in the day but becomes a liability or outright useless in low light defeats the purpose of having a versatile multi-camera setup.

Both Samsung and Google continue to showcase the power of computational photography to bridge the gap with cutting-edge hardware, but these results show that OPPO relies heavily on processing too. The difference is that having better-quality data from a larger sensor gives the processing more to work with in the first place, making it more of a finishing touch than a crutch.

When researching your next high-end camera smartphone, whether it’s a Galaxy, Pixel, iPhone, or one of China’s increasingly impressive Ultra models, it pays to dig a little deeper into the camera specs. Forget claims about megapixels or super-wide apertures; camera sensor size is hugely important, especially when comparing the two or three cameras your next flagship phone might have.

A single weak link can really put a dent in a mobile photographer’s versatility, which certainly isn’t what you want when you’re spending $999 or more.