Samsung Galaxy S23 owners are in line to receive a huge camera upgrade via an incoming firmware update.
A firmware update named S91xNKSU1AWC8 has been announced for Korean S23 users on the Samsung Community (Opens in a new tab) post (trans SamMobile (Opens in a new tab)). This massive 923MB update should appear in other countries soon as well, and bring with it a series of improvements to the Galaxy S23 series’ photographic capabilities.
You can read the patch notes (in Korean) in the community post above, but after being machine translated by ourselves, here’s the rundown.
Shoot faster – and delete
Of the changes, the biggest seems to be the Galaxy S23’s default speed and focus priorities have been changed so you can now take a photo faster, even before the phone finishes focusing. But if that’s not what you want from your camera, you can toggle the settings in Camera Assistant, which is a separate free app available on the Galaxy Store. This gives you additional controls for Galaxy phone photography and allows you to set it so that you can only take a photo when the camera is fully focused as before.
The Gallery app is also getting a small change to allow you to delete photos while your phone is processing them. This means no more waiting around and wasting your phone’s battery on optimizing a photo you know you want to get rid of.
Smaller changes
Several other updates are designed to improve photos and videos captured in specific scenarios. Included are changes that improve camera app stability if there are moving elements in a shot, to video stabilization when recording in Full HD at 60fps with Auto FPS disabled. Image quality improvements have also been made with Night mode turned off and when shooting speed is set as a priority in the Camera Assistant app.
The update also improves image sharpness and reduces flicker in low light when using the Ultra Wide Camera’s Super Steady mode. Plus Super Steady now displays a warning that you need a brightly lit theme to work properly, hopefully encouraging users to turn it on only when it makes a positive difference.
Finally, there are updates that are straightforward bug fixes. This overlay is blurred, a green line that appears when taking photos and bands when taking photos of the sky in medium to low light using the 50MP high-resolution mode (and the Galaxy S23 Ultra’s 200MP mode) instead of the standard 12MP.
Additionally, a strange issue that would stop facial recognition from working after a video call via a third-party app has been addressed.
The best gets better
The Galaxy S23 Ultra is already at the top of our best camera phone guide, with the Galaxy S23 also at the bottom of the list. But we’re excited to see this big list of upgrades appear on our Galaxy S23 units so we can see just how easy and versatile these great phones really are.
Making big changes like this release after release is exactly what Samsung needs to keep up with its latest competing phones, like the Google Pixel 8 series and iPhone 15 we’re expecting later in the year.
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