Samsung’s Comfortable Mediocrity, and the Three Phones That Are Leaving It Behind

There is a certain kind of confidence that looks, from the outside, a lot like indifference. Samsung has been making the Galaxy S Ultra for several generations now, and for several generations, the camera hardware inside has barely moved. Meanwhile, three Chinese manufacturers — Oppo, Vivo, and Xiaomi — have been shipping phones that read like photography press releases: dual 200MP sensors, Hasselblad and Zeiss and Leica partnerships, mechanical zoom rings, modular teleconverter lenses, and sensors so large they borrow technology from dedicated cameras. The question isn’t whether Samsung knows about this. The question is why they don’t seem to care — and whether the...

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