Samsung has revealed the secret sauce behind the Galaxy S21 Ultra's photography prowess.

It is already known that the S21 Ultra's 108MP camera is one of the highest-resolution cameras currently available on cell phones. However, a new video explains the underlying HDR technology that helps this massive sensor take pictures with amazing color and lighting.

The sensor's "Smart-ISO Pro" technology is explained in a YouTube video posted by Samsung. This is a complex technology, but in essence it takes two images and combines the best parts into one photo.

The two raw images are taken at two levels of light sensitivity: high and low. The sensor's sensitivity to light is represented by an ISO number, hence the name Smart-ISO. While Samsung's original version only allowed the camera to select the best level for a given image, the new Pro version allows the two levels to be combined, as explained earlier.

This kind of image combining is a technique called HDR (High Dynamic Range) imaging, which is already an established part of smartphone photography. Offering this technology in a camera sensor is nothing new, but the way Samsung has implemented it in smartphone cameras is novel and a reason to promote it.

The benefit is that it produces more colorful, higher-contrast images of subjects where there is a large difference in brightness between the brightest and darkest areas, such as a sunny landscape with dramatic shadows. In general, this has been an area where smartphone cameras have struggled because their sensors are too small to capture large amounts of light naturally.

This sensor is used in the Galaxy S21 Ultra, but Samsung sells this camera to other companies as well. This means that other phones like the Xiaomi Mi 11 later this year, which is rumored to use Samsung's 108MP camera, could also use this ingenious method of photography. Hopefully, a version of Smart ISO Pro will be included in other Samsung cameras, and the same trick will be available in more basic models of future phones like the Galaxy Note 21 and next year's Galaxy S22.

Unfortunately for Samsung, as good as the S21 Ultra's main camera is, it only came in second in our best camera phone rankings, losing out to the iPhone 12 Pro Max, which is a great camera for a phone with a very good camera and a very good camera for a phone with a very good camera. This shows that it takes more than a clever sensor to be the best on the market.