Samsung Patent Adds Grain to Digital Zoom

A newly published USPTO application describes a method to restore fine texture lost when phone cameras zoom digitally.

Updated on Nov. 6, 2026 in Photography

Bold vector editorial illustration of a cream ceramic sphere with coral and teal grain texture flowing across its surface, representing restored photographic texture. — Samsung has filed a U.S. patent application describing a method that adds film-like grain to digitally zoomed photos to restore texture lost in magnification. AI Illustration. Upload story photo >

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has published a Samsung patent application describing a way to add film-like grain to digitally zoomed photos. The method aims to restore texture that digital zoom removes from images.

Why it matters

Digital zoom enlarges part of an image and can erase details such as skin texture and wall surfaces, leaving photos looking unnatural. A method that restores that texture could make high-magnification phone photos look more realistic.

The patent application lists maximum zoom levels of 30x and 100x on some flagship phones, with 100x first introduced on the Galaxy S20 Ultra in 2020. Whether this grain-restoration method will appear in any commercial device has not been disclosed.

The players

Samsung

Samsung is a South Korean electronics company that makes the Galaxy smartphone line and holds the patent application described in this story.

United States Patent and Trademark Office

The USPTO is the federal agency that examines patent applications and published this Samsung filing.

The details

The system identifies scene content such as skin, sky, and clothing, then builds a texture map by analyzing how rough each area is. It combines brightness, zoom level, sensor gain, and motion into a weight map that sets grain strength per pixel, and machine learning models select the noise type, including film grain, sensor noise, and fractal noise, for each region. For video, grain on still objects stays the same between frames.

2020: The Galaxy S20 Ultra introduced 100x zoom.
November 6, 2026: Article published about the USPTO patent publication.

Culture Shift

The patent extends the high-magnification zoom race that began when the Galaxy S20 Ultra introduced 100x zoom in 2020. It reflects a broader push by phone makers to make digitally enhanced photos look less artificial.

If the feature reaches phones, people shooting distant subjects at high zoom could get images with more natural-looking texture. Without a release date, owners of current devices will not see any change from this filing.

The takeaway

Treat high-zoom phone photos with caution, since digital zoom removes detail that software can only partly restore. Compare samples from different zoom levels before relying on a shot for printing or enlargement.