Samsung Galaxy S23 owners are in line to receive a huge camera upgrade via an incoming firmware update.
The catchily-named firmware update S91xNKSU1AWC8 has been announced for Korean S23 users in a Samsung Community post (via SamMobile). This enormous 923MB update should appear in other countries soon too, and bring with it a series of refinements to the Galaxy S23 series’ photography capabilities.
You can read the patch notes (in Korean) on the Community post above, but after machine translating them ourselves, here's the rundown.
Faster shooting — and deleting
Of the changes, the biggest seems to be the Galaxy S23's default speed and focus priorities have been altered 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 switch the settings over in the Camera Assistant, a separate free app available in the Galaxy Store. This gives you additional controls over your Galaxy phone photography and lets you set it so you can only snap an image when the camera's fully focused as before.
The Gallery app is also getting a small change to let you delete photos while your phone's processing them. That means no more waiting around and wasting your phone's battery enhancing an image you know you want to get rid of.
Smaller changes
Many of the other updates are designed to improve photos and videos taken in specific scenarios. Included here are changes that improve the stability of the Camera app if there are moving subjects in the shot, to video stabilization when recording in FHD at 60fps with Auto FPS disabled. Improvements have also been made to image quality with night mode switched off and when shooting speed is set as the priority in the Camera assistant app.
The update also improves image sharpness and reduces flickering in low light when using Super Steady mode in the ultrawide camera. Plus Super Steady now displays a warning that you need a brightly lit subject to work properly, hopefully encouraging users to only turn it on when it will make a positive difference.
Lastly, there are updates that are straightforward bug fixes. These cover blurring, a green line that would appear when taking photos and banding when taking photos of the sky in mid to low light using the higher-res 50MP mode (and 200MP mode on the Galaxy S23 Ultra) rather than the standard 12MP.
Plus, a strange issue that would stop face recognition from working after making a third-party app video call has also been addressed.
The best gets better
The Galaxy S23 Ultra's already the top of our best camera phone guide, with the Galaxy S23 also sitting further down the list. But we're excited for this big list of upgrades to appear on our own Galaxy S23 units so we can see how much easier and more versatile these already impressive phones can become.
Making big changes like this post-release is exactly what Samsung needs to do to keep up with newer rival phones, such as the Google Pixel 8 and iPhone 15 series that we expect later in the year.
