Samsung Galaxy Fold6 vs Galaxy Fold5

If you are watching this year Samsung Galaxy Z Fold6you’re probably wondering if the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold5 is perhaps the wiser choice. Some will appreciate the improvements, while others may prefer to save some money with the older model, as the two offer largely the same foldable smartphone experience.

So how much better is the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold6 to warrant its premium? Let’s take a look.

Table of contents:

To get started you can: compare full spec sheets or continue directly with our editor’s review in the following text.

Size comparison

Samsung was able to make the Galaxy Z Fold6 significantly more compact than its predecessor, shaving a millimeter or two off the overall width without sacrificing screen size. Even better, the cover display is now larger, but more on that later.

The hinge is also now slightly smaller, making the device feel more compact when folded. The pointed corners on the frame may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but others find them useful for a firmer grip.

The Z Fold6 is also said to be better built, with Samsung marketing an “enhanced armor aluminum” frame that’s stronger than last year’s. The new material and hinge are likely why the Fold6 is lighter.

And while last year’s Z Fold6 was only water-resistant (IPX8), the Fold6’s design now features full ingress protection – IP48. The “4” in the rating means the device is protected against particles larger than 1mm. To be fair, that’s not terribly impressive considering most dust particles are smaller than 1mm. But hey, we guess sand will have to be kept at bay now.

Display comparison

Despite what the specs might lead you to believe, the Fold6 brings quite a few upgrades when it comes to the display. And that’s without even mentioning the aspect ratio of the internal display, which is hardly a notable change. The new Z Fold6 uses a brighter LTPO panel with a variable refresh rate.

The newer Fold comfortably reaches 1,600 nitswhich is considerably more than the less than 1,300 nits Z Fold5. The Fold6’s outer panel is also a lot brighter, going further than 1,500 nitswhile the Z Fold5 settles for a 1.114-nit panel.

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

Lid displays

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

Battery life

In our on-screen battery life tests, the Z Fold6 scored largely similarly to last year’s Fold 5, with the exception of talk times, where we see a bigger difference. We also saw shorter talk times with the Flip, so we’re guessing the new modem is to blame.

The situation is slightly better for the new model when we run the tests on the new display, as the web browsing and video playback runtimes improve. Still, the overall Active Use Score remains similar.

Loading speed

And as with battery life, the new model is a little slower to charge than the old. And that’s with multiple retests to get the best possible speeds (our original test results for the Fold6 review were actually lower). The Fold5 is a few percentage points faster at the 15-minute and 30-minute marks, and reaches 100% a few minutes faster too.

We wouldn’t even say the Z Fold5 is a charging speed champion, but it is disappointing to see the numbers drop off over the course of a generation (and to see them be so inconsistent from charge to charge) for no apparent reason.

Speaker test

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

Performance

As usual, the newer Fold-generation 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 in the Z Fold5. Both phones use special “For Galaxy” versions of the chipsets, meaning the main CPU core comes slightly overclocked.

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

Benchmark performance

According to the synthetic benchmarks, the Z Fold6 is about 25% faster than the Z Fold5 in pure CPU-bound tasks, while combined scenarios like those in AnTuTu 10 only show about 6% gains. In GPU-heavy workloads, the SD8 Gen 3 performs just 2% faster than its predecessor the Z Fold5.

If we are to draw any conclusions from the tests, then the Z Fold6’s better performance will likely go unnoticed by the majority of users. Especially if you plan on playing games, the two devices seem to perform very similarly.

Camera comparison

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

The dual selfie cameras also remain unchanged: a 4MP f/1.8 under-display shooter and a 10MP f/2.2 unit housed in a separate cutout in the cover display.

Image quality

Despite sharing the same hardware, the two devices produce slightly different-looking photos from all three rear cameras. That’s because Samsung has changed its approach to post-processing, now opting for slightly 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 that the Z Fold5’s main camera captures fine details, like grass, slightly better than the Z Fold6 due to the extra sharpness. But other than that, the Z Fold6’s photos have less noise and artifacts.

The Z Fold6’s 2x (digital zoom) photos are better, however, as they have significantly less noise.

The Z Fold6’s ultra-wide camera produces better photos overall — more detail, better contrast, more balanced HDR. Colors are punchier, too.

Finally, the 3x camera’s rendering is similar, but the Z Fold6’s 3x zoom photos are again cleaner and less blurry.

We also found some notable differences in the nighttime post-processing. The Fold6 takes a more balanced, natural-looking approach to Night mode. It sacrifices a little fine detail in the shadows, but removes the noise. The Fold5’s extra sharpening and exaggerated shadow brightness make the photos look rendered, even artificial.

Samsung Z Fold6: 0.6x • 1x • 2x • 3x

Samsung Z Fold5: 0.6x • 1x • 2x • 3x

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

Video quality

It seems that Samsung hasn’t messed around with the video processing that much. We’re struggling to find any difference between the two 4K images from the main cameras. The Z Fold5 does offer a stronger contrast, though.

The same goes for the 3x, ultra-wide and low-light shots.

Samsung Z Fold6: 0.6x • 1x • 3x • 1x

Samsung Z Fold5: 0.6x • 1x • 3x • 1x

Pronunciation

As you can see, you can be misled when comparing the spec sheets of two devices. While the Galaxy Z Fold6 and Z Fold5 may look very similar, they trade blows in several departments, and the results don’t always favor the latter.

The Galaxy Z Fold5 has slightly longer battery life, slightly louder speakers, charges slightly faster, and some people find the photo processing better.

On the other hand, the Z Fold6 now has better displays, improved speaker sound quality, and runs on a slightly faster, more recent chipset. You also get three extra years of major OS updates, since it’s already been a full year since the Z Fold5 was released, and four years was promised to begin with.

That said, we can understand why some users will barely justify a €250-ish difference between the Z Fold6 and Z Fold5. And that price difference might just be the deciding factor.