Galaxy S20 Ultra review: something to prove What you are looking at here, is the Samsung
Galaxy S20 Ultra. And, there's a lot going on. It is big, it has 5G,108
megapixel camera, four other cameras, a massive screen, a high refresh rate,
a1399 dollar starting price.
It's just a lot. (drum beat) If there's a spec that you can think
of for a phone, this phone istrying to beat that spec. The S20 Ultra goes big,
I mean you know, literallybig, look at the phone. And looking at it I think
onething is blindingly obvious.
Samsung feels like ithas something to prove. Let's see if it can.
The best word that I can come up with to describe the S20 Ultra is, imposing.
It has this giant, giant camera bump on the back which sometimescan be a
problem on a table.
But look, the thing lookslike a Galaxy phone overall. Just kind of
taken to the limit. It is as large and nearly as heavy as pretty much any
phonethat I've ever used. It's a monolith.
It sees your puny attemptsat using a phone one handed and it laughs
at you. Now the main reason this phone is as big as it is is so that you can
have this screen which is6.9 inches diagonally. And because this screen doesn't
have a face unlock sensor on it, it can cover nearly theentire front of the
phone.
Now I figured that I'd be annoyed at having to go back to
anin-screen fingerprint sensor instead of face unlock,but I really wasn't
Galaxy S20 Ultra review: something to prove
The sensor is fast andaccurate enough for me, so I've got no
complaints. But the real reason Ithink that this screen shows that Samsung has
something to prove with the S20 Ultra, is theyfinally added the option to
switch it to 120 hertz refresh rate. Now, it comes outta the box at 60 hertz to
save battery but I hopped into settings and turned it on right away and never
looked back because I think it has enough battery life to handle it. And 120 hertz
really does make scrolling and screen animationslook better and smoother.
Samsung even says
thatit stopped bothering with any variable refresh rate based on the contentof
the screen nonsense. It's just locked to 120. Oh, by the way, youcan't have
both 120 hertz and the phone's maximum3200 by 1440 resolution. But, I think the
trade for 1080 by 2300 to get 120 hertz is totally worth it.
And of course, the screen looks great. Looks great indoors,
outdoors, at different angles, with HDR content. Samsung knows how to do this
by now, it's very good at it. And again, because it's nearlyseven inches
diagonally, it looks good 'cause it's just huge. But, look. Samsung has already
donethe make the phone bigger than everybody else thing. That's not actually
whatthe S20 Ultra is about. It's about being bigger inevery way, not just size.
And there is no better place to start talking about what that
means, than to just jump right into the biggest number of all, the 108
megapixel camera.
(relaxing music) So let's just get into it. If you count the depth
sensor, there are five cameras on this phone. And three of them have justsilly
megapixel counts. The selfie camera is 40 megapixels. The telephoto is 48, the
regular wide angle is 108 megapixels. The only camera that isn't out of bounds
megapixel wise is the ultrawide which is 12 megapixels.
But the S20 goes further than
that. So similar to what Huaweidid on it's phones, the telephoto lens here
actually hits a prism and a mirror and redirects the light across the body of
the phone into the sensor, like a periscope.
It means that the phone can get real optical zoom all the way up to
4x, and something really good up to 10x. Then there's this thing that Samsung
calls Space Zoom, which pushes the zoom all the way out to 100x. That's one of
the reasons that Samsung went with a 48 megapixelcamera on the telephoto, so
that it has more pixels to choose from when it starts cropping in.
It also does this thing whereit takes multiple photos to help get
data fromall the sensors to help. So how does all that tech work? Well I tested
this zoomagainst the iPhone 11 Pro, and the Pixel 4 XL, bothwhich have
telephoto lenses.
And for fun, I threwin the Sony RX100 VII. The Pixel 4 XL maxes at 8x zoom, so I just
compared it at that level and I used a tripodfor all of these photos that
you're looking at. I think the RX100 wins, but you know, it's a stand alone
cameraso of course it's gonna. When you just look at the phones, the S20 Ultra
embarrasses the iPhone, and I think it edges out the Pixel 4 too. So far so
good, but whatabout this Space Zoom thing? Well, you can impress your friends
with little whoa moments by zooming all the way into 100x, but truthfully,
I think they look like splotchymesses at that zoom level. I was
able to get some fairly nice stuff at 30x, usually by propping the phone on
something stable.
But, it still looks likea phone photo to me. Okay, but what
about just regular, plain old, non-zoom photos? Well, Samsung is doing
someweird tech stuff here too. So, by default the 108 megapixel sensor makes 12
megapixel imagesbecause the hardware automatically combines ninepixels into one
big pixel.
It's a process called binning. And combined, those binned pixels are about as big aswhat they
would've been on a lower megapixel sensor. Which does help this camera avoid
some of the usual problems that you get with high megapixel sensors. Like bad
low light, and noise. It mostly works. See, in order to makeall of this pixel
binning stuff happen, Samsung still hasto do a lot in the software. Now,
generally I think theS20 wants to smooth out lighting especially on faces, it
wants to keep things bright, and it wants to shifttowards less red tones. And
those are often reallygood instincts for photos. So, for example, I think
theshot of Alex looks great. And this purple plant thing, it's intense in just
the right way. But then, Samsung sometimes steers the S20's tuning just a
little too far.
So, compared to the iPhone, or the Pixel, this photo of me is just
plain over smoothed and over brightened. It is actually super weird. As soon as
the S20 camera sees a face, it brings up the shadows too much it smooths skin
too much,and it tries way too hard to adjust the white balanceand often gets it
wrong. Turn your head 45 degrees where it doesn't see a face, and it's fine.
Turn on pro mode, and it's fine again.
Turn on Bixby Scene Optimizer, and well, okay Bixbymakes it worse,
but still. In a lot of lighting conditions I got good photos of faces but in
challenging conditions it got rough. Samsung tells me thatit's looking into it,
but there's no setting that you can change to change the default behavior of
what this thing does with faces.
The weirdest part though, none of this applies to the selfie
camera. Which is great. Now Samsung also let's you take full on, 108 megapixel
photos, and there's yet more cameratech involved in this like re mosaicing but
the bottom line is you need a lot of lightto get a decent photo at that
resolution.
And even then, my 108 megapixel photos were noisy enough in the
finedetails when I cropped in, that I never really saw the point. Now, when it
comes to low light photos, Samsung is doing better than it ever has, partly
because thesensors are so big here. But it still has a lot of work to do to
catch up to the Pixel 4. And on portrait, again,better than it ever has, but it
still has a lot of work to do to catch up to the iPhone. The selfie camera
though,which is 40 megapixels, is my favorite cameraon this entire phone.
It doesn't do the same badover smoothing on faces, I just really
like it. Finally, I hate to tell you this, but as usual with every phone that
we try, the ultra wide camera is the worst of the three cameras in terms of
quality. Things kinda just get over sharpened as a result of a meh sensor. I
guess the iPhone kindof beats the S20 here, but nothing is really good. Now as
for video, the headline feature is that you can shoot and edit in 8K, and I
dunno,
I think that's kinda gimmicky but I do like that you canpull a
still photo out. More important to me isthe slightly improved video
stabilization 'causeI have pretty shaky hands, but you should knowthat that
still doesn't work in 4K and definitely not in 8K. Last and you know
what,definitely not least, is I saw this thinghunting for focus a lot.
Especially when I was shooting video. I also really like this new feature
called single take which does as many of Samsung's weirdocamera modes as
possible in one long shot. It's fun, but
I wouldn't depend on it for
anything important 'cause the quality is like, not that good. So, that's a lot.
It's a lot of camera which makes sense 'cause this camera bump is so huge
right? I mean, okay. Where do I think it all lands? Well, I think Samsung has a
little bit more work to do on it's photo algorithms. I think it's gonna take a
minute for them to learn how totake all of these huge megapixel counts andturn
them into something that really works in every single context. Especially with
faces. (relaxing music) Now the S20 phones are the very first main stream 5G
phones.
There have been a few before, but they've never been the default and with the S20 line they
are. Now you should knowthat only the S20 Ultra and the S20 Plus supportthe
super high speed millimeter wave-5G thatyou can really only get at like a few
street corners. But, all of them supportthe slightly slower, but much more
widespread mid band 5G. So, okay, here's the stateof 5G in New York City. On
T-Mobile's mid band, I was able to pull anywhere from like 45 down, which is
not much faster than LTE, up to 120 megs per secondin a pretty good spot.
That's real fast. But it's not as fast as what I could get on
Verizon's millimeter wave, where I saw downloadspeeds hit over 1300 Mbps. Which
is incredible. I got that on one street corner,if I held my phone right, and I
didn't turn my body around.
And I didn't walk half a block away. And if I was lucky because
sometimes it would drop down toLTE anyway in that spot. Yeah, that's 5G for ya.
It's just not fully ready yet. Don't buy this phone justbecause it's a 5G
phone. In fact, don't buy any phonejust because it's a 5G phone.
(upbeat music) Samsung always boaststhe best possible specs
for an Android phone on the Galaxy S line, and this year is no different. But
what is different this year, is that I think a couple of those specs could
actually matter for people. I'm not talking about theSnapdragon 865 processor,
which obviously is fastbut it's not in a way that I think people are
reallygonna notice over the 855. What I mean are things like the battery. It's
5000 milliamps here, which is huge and has let me run a fullday with very heavy
use. I've done it several times now. 5G might bring that battery life down a
tick, but I was clearing six hours of screen time with 120hertz refresh rate
turned on.
The RAM matters too, you get 12 or 16 gigs of RAM depending on
which model you buy and that means that apps close less often in the background
and you can even pin apps to memory which means that Android won't be able
toclose them in the background. This might seem like aweird power user feature,
but let's be honest this isa weird power user phone.
Samsung is also
sticking to it's guns by offering expandable storage and it's not keeping the
headphone jack. And it is okay to be sad about that, don't let anybody tell you
different. The other side of performance is software, and for the most
partSamsung is doing a solid job with One UI on top of Android 10.
I still like it, but Samsung is starting to Samsung it up a
littlebit with feature creep. Everything that it'sever made is still here, and
too much of it issitting in the settings tray and it's ready to confuse you.
There's Quick Share,which is like Air Drop but only for Galaxy phones. There's
Link Share, whichlet's you throw stuff online for a private linkfor people to
download for a day or two.
There's Music Share,which let's other people with Galaxy phones
play their music on the Bluetooth device that's paired to your Galaxy phone.
But it's not as weird as Samsung Daily which sits next to the home screen and
just doesn't really offeruseful cards for anything. Or, as weird as Bixby which
sits under a long press of the power button and it's still just Bixby.
Overall, the experience onthe S20 Ultra is quite good, but it takes
a day ortwo of dismissing prompts and turning off stuff that you don't want.
Which is super annoying. So, Galaxy S20 Ultra. Did Samsung prove that it could
make the best screen on a smart phone? Yes it did. Well, yes it did but that
doesn't mean that your city or your carrier has it.
Did Samsung prove that it
could throw every single performance spec possible into a single phone? I mean,
obviously it did. This is Samsung. But the biggest thingthat Samsung had to
prove is that it could stay in the camera fight and do so with bigmegapixel
sensors and zoom. And I think on zoom, Samsung has proved that it's hardware
can beat Google and Apple at around 8x,but it's not magic enough to get
something great beyond that. I'm more worried about how the camera treats faces
though,because I think Samsung is still Samsungin' up alittle bit too much
there.
Mostly though, Samsungproved that when it wants to it can still go
all out with the phone. I mean, they did call this the Ultra, which is another
way of saying a lot. And yeah, this phone is a lot. (evil laugh) That was dumb.
A lot of phone, lots ofphone, so many phone. Phones on phones. Mega phone. Mega
phone, it's loud right. Huh? Thanks for watching. Like and subscribe.
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