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My S21 with "scumbag zoom" or creeper zoom. The amount of zoom, in something as thin as it is, is mind blowing. To zoom 10x, and be able to take great pictures, hand held with almost no shake. Then you have the top GoPros shooting 5k with gimbal like stabilization. Cameras are getting crazy.

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If I remember right, newer Samsungs have their stack of telephoto optics pointing toward the top of the phone, parallel to the display. Then use a periscope style prism to look out and forward. That way you aren't limited by the device thickness (although I guess now the diameter of the lenses is constrained)

Yeah -- this is typically called "folded optics".

There have been experiments with this over the years. Minolta coined the phrase for a 3x zoom in the DiMAGE X series, starting twenty years ago, and as I recall they were the first to use this technology in a consumer camera:

https://www.dpreview.com/reviews/minoltadimagex

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