Besides the design, the camera system is the biggest difference between the Z Fold 8 and the Z Fold 8 Ultra. On the back, you have two 50-megapixel cameras: a main camera with an f/1.8 aperture, OIS and PDAF, as well as a 50-megapixel ultra-wide. For the front cameras, you will get two 10-megapixel punch-hole cameras – one on the interior screen and one on the exterior. Of course, like any foldable phone, you’ll be able to use the higher quality rear cameras for selfies, so it’s not such a big deal that the front cameras are lower quality.
The absence of a telephoto lens should be noted. There’s no optical zoom of any kind here: magnification relies entirely on digital zoom up to 10x. This is a real downgrade from the Z Fold 7 and Z Fold 8 Ultra, which combined a 200 MP main sensor with a 10 MP 3x optical telephoto lens.
In fact, the lack of a telephoto lens is one of my biggest gripes with the phone in general. I would have been perfectly fine with Samsung adopting the S26 Ultra’s quad-lens system for the Z Fold 8 Ultra and putting an inferior telephoto lens on the standard Z Fold 8, but having no telephoto lens on a phone that costs this much is pretty silly.
The cameras built into the phone work quite well. The main camera produces accurate colors, and daylight photos are bright, detailed, and about what you’d expect from a Samsung flagship. The 50MP ultrawide is a higher resolution than the Z Fold 7’s 12MP unit, and it holds up well in landscapes and group photos. For social media, family photos, and travel snapshots, most people will be perfectly happy with what this camera produces.
But again, the zoomed shots are a bit disappointing. Digital zooming to 2x or 3x is passable thanks to that 50MP sensor’s resolution headroom, but push towards that 10x limit and the processing can’t do much: edges soften, details get smudged, and you remember that no amount of computing completely replaces a dedicated camera with optical zoom.
Low light photography is similar. The main camera has a decent enough sensor, but it’s not as impressive as the 200-megapixel camera built into the Z Fold 8 Ultra, and this shows up clearly in low-lit scenes. Photos taken in low-light scenarios will show more noise and less dynamic range. In truly dark conditions, this camera trails the best panel flagships by a long shot. Finally, the dual 10MP selfie cameras are unremarkable but perfectly suited to video calls, which is arguably their main task on a device like this.
