Samsung Galaxy Fold6 vs Galaxy Fold5 comparison

If you’re looking at the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold6 this year, you might be wondering if the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold5 is the more sensible choice. Some may appreciate the improvements, while others may prefer to save some money with the older model since both offer mostly the same foldable smartphone experience.

So, is the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold6 worth its high price? Let’s take a look.

table of contents:

For starters, you can compare full spec sheets or jump straight to our editor’s review. In the following text.

Size comparison

Samsung has managed to make the Galaxy Z Fold6 reasonably more compact than its predecessor. The designers have shaved off a millimeter or two on all sides without sacrificing the screen diagonal. Better yet, the cover screen is now larger, but more on that later.

The hinge is now slightly smaller and makes the device feel more compact when used folded. The tapered corners on the frame may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but some find them useful for holding the device more securely.

The Z Fold6’s design is also said to be better. Samsung is marketing a “reinforced armored aluminum” frame that’s stronger than last year’s. The new material and new hinge are probably why the Fold6 is lighter.

While last year’s Z Fold6 only had water resistance (IPX8), the Fold6’s design now has full protection against water ingress – IP48. The “4” in the rating means the device is protected against particles larger than 1mm. To be fair, that’s not very impressive, as most dust particles are smaller than 1mm. But, hey, we guess the sand should be out now.

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Despite what the spec sheet might have you believe, the Fold6 brings quite a few upgrades in the display department. And we’re not talking about the aspect ratio of the internal display. That’s not a noticeable change. The new Z Fold6 uses a brighter LTPO panel with a variable refresh rate.

The latest foldable arrives easily. 1600 candleswhich is much more than Less than 1300 candles Z Fold5. The outer panel on the Fold6 is also brighter, surpassing 1500 candlesWhile the Z Fold5 settles on 1,114 candles Board.

Additionally, the Z Fold6’s outer display is now wider, adding another 0.1 inches to the diagonal. It’s not perfect, but it’s more usable with the new aspect ratio.

Cover view

Overall, the Z Fold6 easily wins this round thanks to its slightly wider aspect ratio, thinner bezels, and of course, brighter displays.

Battery life

In our battery endurance tests on the internal display, the Z Fold6 scored mostly similar to last year’s Fold 5 except for call times where we see a bigger gap. We also noticed shorter call times with the Flip, so we think the new modem is to blame for that.

Things get a little better for the new model when we run tests on the new display, with improved web browsing and video playback times, but overall active usage scores remain similar.

Shipping speed

As with battery life, the new model is a bit slower to charge than the old model. After several retests to get the best possible speeds (our original test results for the Fold6 review were lower than that), the Fold5 is a few percentage points faster at the 15-minute and 30-minute marks and reaches 100% a few minutes faster as well.

We wouldn’t even suggest that the Z Fold5 is the charging speed champion, but seeing the numbers drop over the course of a generation (not to mention being inconsistent from charge to charge) for no apparent reason is disappointing.

Speaker test

While there’s a slight drop in volume on the Fold6 compared to the Fold5, the former does sound noticeably better than its predecessor. The Z Fold6 has a warmer, deeper sound, while the Fold5 sounds quite flat in comparison. We’d pick the Z Fold6 any day over last year’s Fold.

performance

As always, the latest generation of Fold features Qualcomm’s latest flagship SoC, promising better performance and improved efficiency. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 powers the Z Fold6, succeeding the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 inside the Z Fold5. Both phones use special “For Galaxy” versions of the chipset, meaning the main CPU core is slightly overclocked.

Memory options remain unchanged from the Z Fold5. Both devices offer a 12GB/256GB storage configuration as standard, but you can choose either 512GB or 1TB. UFS 4.0 is the storage standard in both cases.

Standard performance

According to synthetic benchmarks, the Z Fold6 is about 25% faster than the Z Fold5 in purely CPU-intensive tasks, while aggregated scenarios like those in AnTuTu 10 show only about a 6% increase. In GPU-heavy workloads, the SD8 Gen 3 is only about 2% faster than its predecessor inside the Z Fold5.

If we were to draw any conclusions from the tests, the Z Fold6’s better performance will likely remain unnoticed by most users. Especially if you plan on playing games, the two phones seem to perform very similarly.

Camera comparison

The two devices share exactly the same camera hardware. There are no changes at all. The 50MP f/1.8 main camera still does the hard work, and it’s joined by a 10MP f/2.4 telephoto camera with 3x optical zoom and a 12MP f/2.2 ultrawide camera with a 123-degree field of view.

The selfie cameras remain unchanged too – a 4MP f/1.8 camera under the display for the inner display and a 10MP f/2.2 unit in its own hole of the cover display.

Image quality

Despite having the same hardware, the two devices deliver slightly different looking images thanks to the triple camera setup on the back. This is because Samsung has changed its approach to post-processing and is now moving towards less saturated colors and less sharpening.

Samsung Z Fold6: 0.6x • 1x • 2x • 3x

Samsung Z Fold5: 0.6x • 1x • 2x • 3x

You can see the Z Fold5’s main camera resolving fine details, like grass, a little better than the Z Fold6 due to the added sharpness, but otherwise the Z Fold6’s photos are cleaner than noise and artifacts.

However, the photos taken with 2x digital zoom with the Z Fold6 are better, as they are significantly less noisy.

The Z Fold6’s ultra-wide camera produces better photos overall — better detail, better contrast, and a more balanced high dynamic range. Colors are also more vivid.

Finally, the 3x zoom camera offering is similar, but the 3x zoom photos the Z Fold6 takes are again cleaner and less blurry, so to speak.

We found some noticeable differences in the night post-processing as well. The Fold6 has a more balanced, natural-looking approach to Night mode. It sacrifices a bit of fine detail in the shadows but gets rid of noise. The Fold5’s extra sharpening and overly bright shadows make still images look artificial.

Samsung Z Fold6: 0.6x • 1x • 2x • 3x

Samsung Z Fold5: 0.6x • 1x • 2x • 3x

The same observations apply to the auxiliary cameras, although the difference between the two devices is less. In fact, the 2x zoom crops look identical.

Video Quality

Samsung doesn’t seem to have messed around with the video processing too much. It’s hard to find any difference between 4K shots from the main cameras. However, the Z Fold5 offers stronger contrast.

The same can be said for 3x, ultra-wide, and low-light shots as well.

Samsung Z Fold6: 0.6x • 1x • 3x • 1x

Samsung Z Fold5: 0.6x • 1x • 3x • 1x

The verdict

As you can see, comparing the specs of just two phones can be misleading. Although the Galaxy Z Fold6 and Z Fold5 are very similar, they trade blows in different departments and the results are not always in favor of the newer model.

The Galaxy Z Fold5 has slightly better battery life, slightly louder speakers, is slightly faster to charge and some may find the image processing better.

On the other hand, the Z Fold6’s displays are now better, the speaker’s sound quality is improved, and it runs on a newer, slightly faster chip. Plus, you get an extra three years of major OS updates, up from a full year since the Z Fold5 was released and four years were initially promised.

Having said that, we can see how some users won’t justify the €250 difference between the Z Fold6 and the Z Fold5. And that price difference could be the deciding factor.