In recent years, hardware features from Samsung's flagship smartphones have been trickling down to its mid-range offerings at a fairly quick pace. Features like high refresh rate displays, stereo speakers, water resistant designs, and long-term software update support have considerably elevated some of Samsung's mid-range phones above the drivel the company had been serving customers just a couple of years ago.
The Galaxy A5x and Galaxy A7x lineups are the best examples of Samsung putting high-end features into phones that don't burn a hole in your pockets. And while rumors suggest Samsung wants to stop focusing on cutting costs and go straight for Apple's throat, it probably won't abandon mid-range phones completely or stop bringing more flagship features to them in the coming years.
There's no way to predict what the next flagship-grade feature to arrive on mid-range Galaxy phones would be, but if I were given a choice, I think I would pick zoom cameras above anything else. Samsung has included a zoom camera with some mid-range devices in the past, with 2021's Galaxy A72 being the most recent example. Generally, though, zooming capabilities have been reserved for the company's flagships.
Enough with the unneeded macro and depth cameras on mid-range Galaxy phones
Customers who buy Samsung's mid-range phones have to make do with two unnecessary cameras. Those would be the macro and depth-sensing cameras, both of which virtually serve no purpose and mostly just exist to increase the number of cameras on the spec sheet.
I mean, do we really need a depth-sensing camera when background blur in photos can be achieved through software manipulation? Do we need a 5MP macro camera that has no detail or sharpness in the photos it captures because the megapixel count is too low?
The answer is no, we don't need either of those, at least in my opinion. The opposite is true for a zoom camera, though. As limited as zooming capabilities can be on smartphones compared to dedicated cameras, there's no denying the fact that having those capabilities is better than not having any at all.
But I guess Samsung doesn't think so. While last year's Galaxy A72 had a 3x optical zoom lens, it was replaced on the Galaxy A73 by… you guessed it… those unnecessary macro and depth sensors. Granted, the Galaxy A73 doubled the megapixel count for the primary camera (from 64MP to 108MP), but in practice, the gains from that upgrade weren't remotely enough to make up for what was lost by the removal of the zoom camera.
And that is unfortunate. As it stands, the lack of optical zoom is the only thing that holds me back from using one of Samsung's mid-rangers as a daily driver. Zoom cameras have remained exclusive to flagship Galaxy phones for five years at this point, but here's hoping we won't need to wait another five years for that to change.
