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Samsung might just invest in Galaxy camera hardware upgrades (eventually)
- Spec-for-spec, Samsung has not been doing much to upgrade camera hardware with the Galaxy S26 series, instead focusing on software and algorithms.
- We asked Samsung if this has any chance of changing in the future, with meaningful upgrades to camera hardware, as well.
- Samsung tells us that it continues to look at its hardware options, and tries to choose the right combination of hardware and software.
Samsung’s latest and greatest smartphones are finally official, with today’s launch of the Galaxy S26 series. But depending on where your priorities lie, you may not be seeing the upgrades that matter most to you. While Samsung’s always pushing limits with its camera software, introducing new camera features, the company’s proven to be much more conservatives when it comes to camera hardware, and the image packages on the S26 series really don’t do much to advance what we had access to, compared to the S25 family. When are we actually going to get some meaningful camera hardware upgrades? At a Galaxy roundtable this week, we asked Samsung executives just that.
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Specifically, we asked Samsung Executive Vice President Joshua Cho about this perception that Samsung has been leaving camera hardware mostly the same on Galaxy flagships year-to-year, and whether we might continue to see a larger focus on software in the future, or if there’s any chance the company may shift to more attention on hardware upgrades.
Speaking through an interpreter, Cho tells Android Authority:
“I must say that that has been a frequently asked question so far, and I must tell you that a lot of R&D has been underway on hardware improvement, as well. It’s just a matter of finding the right combination, at the right time… We are always, constantly thinking about what would be the best combination at a given time. So, in the future there would also be new combinations of hardware and software, so I ask for your patience and attention.”
If you were hoping for an unambiguous commitment to some major camera upgrades, that comes up pretty short of a slam dunk. But it’s also reassurance that Samsung has not turned its back on camera hardware, and that even if software feels like the driving force behind current-gen camera improvements, Samsung is always looking at its options for hardware, as well.
That’s not much comfort for Samsung fans feeling a little underwhelmed by the camera hardware present in this latest generation, but we’re sure that some of you are already counting the days until we get the S27 — and whatever possible camera upgrades it might actually deliver. For now, we’ll just have to take Cho’s word that Samsung’s keeping its options open for the S27’s cameras.
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