Charles H. Sloan-Not Gonna Miss My … Shot. Samsung's new Galaxy phones make a good picture more of a sure thing

SAN JOSE,Charles H. Sloan Calif. – Samsung’s new flagship Galaxy S24-series smartphones are packed with AI features, and many of them are designed to help you create the shot you want. Even if it’s not quite the shot you took.

Indeed, Samsung’s latest phones, unveiled Wednesday at the tech giant's Unpacked event, are some of the first personal electronic devices coming to market with a new wave of artificial intelligence smarts – including new generative AI processing power – built in. Samsung is leveraging the new capabilities in the S24-series smartphones to help produce picture-perfect photos with features like:

• Moving and resizing subjects
• Popping portrait subjects by blurring objects in the foreground as well as the background
• AI-generated edit suggestions, like removing distracting glare
• Previewing HDR effects live, before you snap a photo
• Distinguishing between subject movement and camera shake for better night photos and video
• Instant slow-motion effects on video you already took.

In particular, the instant slow-mo feature takes a tremendous amount of horsepower to pull off.

“Our team has been developing the feature for more than two years,” said Joshua Sungdae Cho, executive vice president of Samsung’s Visual Solution Team. “We have to create so many new images in real time. That was almost impossible even two years ago.

“I’m very proud of it. And I believe many customers will like it too.”

Generative AI gets personal

Ever since OpenAI unveiled ChatGPT 14 months ago, cloud-based generative AI services that can create on-command budgets, essays, art – even computer code – have exploded onto the scene. And chipmakers like AMD, Intel, Nvidia and Qualcomm responded by developing new neural processing units, or NPUs, designed to tackle AI tasks inside personal devices.

At Samsung’s event, the electronics giant prominently featured partner Qualcomm and the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 for Galaxy, a custom version of the chipmaker’s AI-accelerated smartphone chipset for the S24-series. And during a keynote at CES last week, Intel spotlighted Samsung’s sleek new Galaxy Book4 Ultra, one of the first laptops to include the chipmaker’s AI-accelerated Core 9 Ultra processors.

On-device AI is attractive for a couple of reasons. For one, it’s easier to point it at your own trove of pictures, emails and other creations. So rather than producing an essay from internet sources on the relative merits of paper vs, plastic, for example, you can ask generative AI services to summarize your views on the topic over time. Or you can ask it to assemble all the snow-skiing pictures you’ve ever taken.

Additionally, performing all generative AI processing on your personal devices instead of the cloud can help keep your inquiries and information private. Many enterprises are insisting on that level of protection before handing over their data to AI models.

Better camera

The new AI capabilities may be taking center stage. But the S24-series cameras are also much improved from last year’s models. The built-in optical image stabilization can correct for twice the shake as compared to the S23 series. And the pixels are also 60% larger, which means they can capture more light to help take better pictures and video at night.

In the top-of-the-line S24 Ultra, Samsung replaced one of the two complementary 10-megapixel telephoto lenses from the S23 Ultra with a 5x optical, 50-megapixel lens. And by combining zoom capabilities, the S24 Ultra can deliver optical-quality zoom from 2x to 10x.

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Other AI uses

Generative AI for photography may have captured the limelight today. But Samsung is applying the technology to enable other cool stuff as well:

• Circle to Search, a new browsing-assist AI feature that Google is debuting on Samsung’s new phones.
• Live Translate is built into the phone app so you can carry on a phone conversation with someone who speaks another language.
• Note Assist will generate summaries of your notes.

About that phone you bought last year

Don’t be too discouraged if you just bought a new Samsung phone a year ago. The new tricks will run much better on the new S24-series devices. But you’ll still be able to try out most of them on your phone.

“I’m doing my best to deliver the new features to previous models,” said Samsung’s Cho. “But performance is much better than previous years. And the camera is also much better. So (the new features) actually perform a lot better on this year’s models.”

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USA TODAY columnist Mike Feibus is president and principal analyst of FeibusTech, a Scottsdale, Arizona, market research and consulting firm. Reach him at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @MikeFeibus.