Samsung added a new kind of camera to the back of the Galaxy S10 and S10+: a 123-degree, 16MP wide-angle unit. And while many people are familiar with the look of a camera phone's 2x telephoto lens—which we've seen on the Galaxy Note 8, Note 9, S9+, and various iPhones—fewer have peered into the world of wide-angle photography, which in the US has largely been the purview of LG.

LG has had wide-angle cameras on board since its G6 model, and its current V40 matches the S10's triple-camera layout with a 2X zoom, a standard lens, and a wide-angle camera. But the V40's camera isn't quite as wide: It has a 107-degree field of view as compared with the S10+'s 123 degrees.

There are pluses and minuses to that. Wide-angle lenses tend to have fish-eye distortion around the edges of images, and a wider-angle lens means more distortion. Overall, though, I prefer the Galaxy S10+'s even-wider-angle approach because if you're shooting wide angle, why not go all the way?

Pictured above are standard and wide-angle photos from the Galaxy S10+. Compare them with photos taken with the LG V40 below.

Both the Galaxy S10+ and the V40 also have dual front cameras. The V40's are genuinely two cameras with different fields of view: an 8-megapixel, 80-degree camera and a 5-megapixel, 90-degree camera. Samsung is just using digital trickery here. Samsung's secondary front-facing camera is only used for depth effects, so when you click the button to zoom in or out in Samsung's selfie mode, you're just digitally cropping the 10-megapixel front-facing camera.

You can tell the difference in these two shots. In the wide-angle selfie from the V40 (the second image below; the first image is from the S10+), you can see another entryway on either side of me in the background; it's a genuinely wider-angle camera, better for taking photos of groups of people.

As I've been using the Galaxy S10+ cameras, I've been impressed but not blown away. Performance, anecdotally, is very similar to the Galaxy S9+, with the addition of the new wide-angle shooter. And I'm familiar with the wide-angle camera from the LG phones, so it isn't a tremendous surprise to use it. Mostly, I'm hoping that new software from Samsung can improve the S10's low-light mode to match the Google Pixel 3, as I showed in our Night Sight camera comparison.

We'll have more Galaxy S10 coverage as the week goes on, so check back soon. For more now, head over to our Galaxy S10 bechmarks and our fingerprint sensor test results.