If you are eyeing this year’s Samsung Galaxy Z Fold6, you’re probably wondering if the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold5 is perhaps the more sensible choice. Some might appreciate the improvements, while others might prefer to save some cash with the older model since the two offer mostly the same foldable smartphone experience.
So how much better is the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold6 to deserve its price premium? Let’s look into it.
Table of Contents:
For starters, you can compare the complete specs sheets or directly continue with our editor’s assessment in the following text.
Size comparison
Samsung was able to make the Galaxy Z Fold6 sensibly more compact than its predecessor. Designers shaved off a millimeter or two all-around without sacrificing the screen diagonal. Even better, the cover screen is now bigger, but more on that later.
The hinge is also a tad smaller now and makes the device feel more compact when using it folded. The pointy angles on the frame might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but others find them helpful for a more secure grip.
The Z Fold6 is supposedly built better too. Samsung markets an “enhanced armor aluminum” frame that’s tougher than last year’s. The new material and the new hinge are probably the reason why the Fold6 is lighter.
And while last year’s Z Fold6 had only water protection (IPX8), the Fold6’s design now has the full ingress protection – IP48. The “4” in the rating means the device is protected against particles bigger than 1mm. To be fair, that’s not very impressive, as most dust particles are smaller than 1mm. But, hey, we guess sand should be kept at bay now.
Display comparison
Despite what the specs sheet may make you believe, the Fold6 brings quite a few upgrades in the display department. And we are not talking about the inner display’s aspect ratio. That’s hardly a notable change. The new Z Fold6 employs a brighter LTPO panel with a variable refresh rate.
The newer Fold comfortably reaches 1,600 nits, which is considerably more than the sub-1,300-nit Z Fold5. The outer panel on the Fold6 is also a lot brighter, going beyond 1,500 nits, while the Z Fold5 settles for a 1,114-nit panel.
Moreover, the Z Fold6’s outer screen is wider, adding another 0.1″ to the diagonal. It’s not perfect, but it’s a tad more usable with the new aspect ratio.
Cover displays
All in all, the Z Fold6 easily wins in this round thanks to its slightly wider aspect ratio, thinner bezels and, of course, the brighter screens.
Battery life
In our battery endurance tests on the internal screen, the Z Fold6 posted mostly similar scored to last year’s Fold 5 with the exception of call times where we see a larger gap. We observed shorter call times with the Flip too, so we guess the new modem is to blame.
The situation is a bit better for the new model when we run the tests on the new screen as the web browsing and video playback runtimes improve. Still, the overall Active Use Score remains similar.
Charging speed
And just like with battery life, the new model is slightly slower to charge than the old one. And that’s with several re-tests to get the best possible speeds (our original test results for the Fold6 review were even lower). The Fold5 is a few percentage points faster at the 15-minute- and 30-minute marks and reaches 100% a couple of minutes faster too.
And we won’t even suggest the Z Fold5 is a charging speed champion, but seeing the numbers drop over a generation (not to mention being so inconsistent from charge to charge) with no apparent reason is disappointing.
Speaker test
While there’s a slight decline in loudness in the Fold6 compared to the Fold5, the former sounds noticeably better than its predecessor. The Z Fold6 has a warmer and deeper sound, while the Fold5 sounds right out flat in comparison. We’d pick the Z Fold6 any day over last year’s Fold.
Performance
As usual, the newer Fold generation sports the latest flagship SoC from Qualcomm, promising better performance and improved efficiency. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 powers up the Z Fold6, succeeding the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 inside the Z Fold5. Both phones use the special “For Galaxy” versions of the chipsets, meaning that the main CPU core is slightly overclocked.
The memory options remain unchanged coming from the Z Fold5. Both devices offer the 12GB/256GB memory configuration as a standard, but you can choose either 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 show just around 6% gain. In GPU-heavy workloads, the SD8 Gen 3 performs just 2% faster than its predecessor inside the Z Fold5.
If we have to draw any conclusions from the tests, the Z Fold6’s better performance will likely remain unfelt by the majority of users. Especially if you plan to play games, the two handsets seem to perform very similarly.
Camera comparison
The two devices share the same exact camera hardware. There are no changes at all. The main 50MP f/1.8 camera is still doing the heavy lifting and is joined by a 10MP f/2.4 telephoto camera with 3x optical zoom and a 12MP f/2.2 ultrawide camera with 123-degree field of view.
The two selfie cameras remain unchanged as well – 4MP f/1.8 under-display camera for the inner screen and a 10MP f/2.2 unit in its own cutout of the cover screen.
Image quality
Despite having the same hardware, the two devices deliver slightly different-looking photos with all of its three cameras on the back. That’s because Samsung has shifted its approach to post-processing and is now going for slightly less saturated colors and uses 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 cam resolving fine detail, like grass, a tad better than the Z Fold6 due to the added sharpness, but otherwise, but the Z Fold6’s photos are cleaner of noise and artifacts.
The 2x (digital zoom) photos by the Z Fold6 are better, though, as they are considerably less noisy.
The Z Fold6’s ultrawide camera outputs nicer stills overall – better detail, better contrast, more balanced HDR. Colors are punchier, too.
And finally, the 3x camera’s rendition is similar, but the Z Fold6’s 3x zoom photos are again cleaner and less fuzzy, if you will.
We found some notable differences in the nighttime post-processing too. The Fold6 has a more balanced, natural-looking approach to the Night mode. It sacrifices a little bit of fine detail in the shadows but gets rid of the noise. The additional sharpening on the Fold5 and the overly bright shadows make the stills look rendered, artificial even.
Samsung Z Fold6: 0.6x • 1x • 2x • 3x
Samsung Z Fold5: 0.6x • 1x • 2x • 3x
The observations are true for the auxiliary cameras, although there’s less of a difference between the two devices. In fact, the 2x zoom crops look identical.
Video quality
It appears that Samsung didn’t mess with the video processing as much. We are hard-pressed to find any difference between the two 4K footages with the main cameras. The Z Fold5 offers stronger contrast, though.
The same can be said for the 3x, ultrawide and low-light footages as well.
Samsung Z Fold6: 0.6x • 1x • 3x • 1x
Samsung Z Fold5: 0.6x • 1x • 3x • 1x
Verdict
As you can see, you can be misled when comparing the specs sheets of two handsets alone. Even though the Galaxy Z Fold6 and the Z Fold5 look very similar, they trade blows in the different departments and the results are not always in favor of the latest model.
The Galaxy Z Fold5 has slightly better battery life, a tad louder speakers, it’s slightly faster to charge and some may find the photo processing nicer.
On the other hand, the Z Fold6’s displays are better now, speaker sound quality has improved, and it runs on a tad faster, more recent chipset. Additionally, you get three extra years of major OS updates, seeing how a whole year has already passed since the Z Fold5’s release and it’s promised four years to begin with.
Having said that, we can see how some users will hardly justify a €250-ish difference between the Z Fold6 and Z Fold5. And this price gap might just be the deciding factor.
Get the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold6 for:
The better displays (incl. a larger cover screen).
The nicer speakers.
The faster CPU.
The more natural camera processing.
Three extra years of OS updates.
Get the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold5 for:
The lower price tag.
The longer battery life (call time).
The more expressive camera processing.