- "Is it worth it"?
Well,
you clicked on the right page my friends.
For the last week or so,
I've been daily driving this Samsung Galaxy Z Flip.
And there is a lot like,
however at $1400, it really begs the question,
shouldn't you just spend that money
on the Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra,
or make better financial decisions?
"I honestly want to know if you were able
"to fit the phone in your pocket, that's it,
"that's the tweet".
Well, I mean, we can find out, I mean,
(upbeat music)
yes.
It actually fits in the pocket fine
"Does it seem too big,
"Or has it reached the point of almost being a tablet"?
I am still kinda on the fence on this one.
So this is a 6.9 inch smartphone.
It's big.
It is very big.
And as someone who's typically not a big fan
of large smartphones,
it's a little bit annoying, right?
So especially last night,
as I was sort of scrolling through Twitter,
I was on the phone for like 30 minutes,
and at that point, like,
kinda I used a little pinky grip,
and it was just starting to feel sort of heavy and annoying.
"Does it come with a clear case in the box
"like the Asian markets do?
No.
More specifically, we get the phone itself,
the pretty beefy power adapter, USB-C to C cable,
and a pair of USB-C AKG headphones.
"Does it come with a screen protector out of the box"?
Yes it does.
And I proceed to immediately take it off,
because, look, I'm gonna be real,
I started peeling it off
because I thought it was the protective plastic.
"Is 120 hertz really worth getting over
"a normal 60 hertz phone"?
Yes.
So last year of course, OnePlus brought out 90 hertz displays.
However this year, we have a full 120 hertz on the S20,
and the S20 Plus and the Ultra.
So I actually went much more in depth on this,
on my podcast The Test Drivers,
which you can shamelessly download
at the link in the description
if you haven't already subscribed.
(clears throat)
Sorry, what was that?
(clears throat)
Right out of the box,
you can see it set to not only 1080p resolution,
but standard 60 hertz smoothness.
Now the thing is,
well, I mean sure, for some people that might be all right.
When you paying this much money for a phone,
I mean you gotta turn that on, right?
Am I uncomfortably close right now?
Look, Ken's been gone,
he's in Japan right now,
I had to shoot this video by myself.
So things are gonna get weird, I apologize.
The main downside is that you have to run it at 1080p
to get that full 120 hertz experience.
If you want the full resolution of this phone,
which would be nice, especially considering how huge it is,
you have to run it at 60 hertz.
So your trade off is literally
full resolution with 60 frames per second,
or lower resolution, with 120.
"Geekbench or AnTuTu benchmark"?
So this is the first time
that I've used a Snapdragon 865 powered device,
which as you may expect,
is the most powerful Android phone yet,
easily outperforming the last year's model
of like the Galaxy S10, as well as the OnePlus.
However, while it is more powerful than most Android phones,
if you compare it to something like the iPhone 11,
it is close but it still falls behind
specifically in single thread.
"How fast is the phone unlock
"with the in-display fingerprint sensor"?
It's fine.
So as far as I can tell talking with Samsung,
it is very similar if not identical
to the sensor that we had on the S10 last year.
Which means that it is fine.
I will say after spending this last week
with also the Z Flip,
I much prefer how fast the side mounted,
actual physical fingerprint sensor is
on this phone as opposed to the S20 Ultra.
It's certainly not bad,
but it's not really major improvement over last year.
"5G speeds"?
So I am using the S20 Ultra on T-Mobile's 5G network.
Now I do have 5G here at the office,
however, what I have is their sub-6 5G.
Which means that it is similar to 4G LTE,
except it's faster, but it's not quite as crazy
as some of those mmWave speeds
that you might see on some other networks.
And that technically, S20 Ultra does support,
if I was on, say like Verizon or something.
But well, let's just speed test it and see.
So I have full bars of 5G right now.
And I am getting 40, 50, 50 megs down.
This is while a step forward for LTE and it's better than
generally speaking than most LTE.
It is not as crazy as some of those mmWave speeds
that you've probably seen in like Marques' video.
"How's the battery life been"?
Good.
So of course,
the Ultra one of it's headlining features, among many,
many ridiculous specs,
is a huge 5000 milliamp hour battery.
Now to be fair,
I have not spent enough time
to really get to grips with this,
especially 'cause I haven't been on any kind of millimeter
wave 5G, it's been kinda fairly standard use.
But I've easily been able to get through a full day of use
with this guy,
which well, shouldn't be a surprise,
even with that 120 hertz display on.
"Is 100 times space zoom just a gimmick"?
Well, no.
So this does have a five times optical zoom,
not 10 times optical zoom,
like I was led to believe before.
(clears throat)
So if we jump into the camera,
you can see that if I switch over to the ultra wide,
that's night mode, I don't want that.
But I switch to the ultra wide,
you can see that obviously very wide field of view,
switch to the standard, it looks nice,
but as soon as I go to zoom in, I'm at five times,
And that's actually a pretty significant zoom.
You can really see a lot closer.
However once you start getting beyond that,
it gets to be a little sketchy.
So if I pull up this feature again,
so we can go to 10 times,
which, say I wanna look at the camera on the ceiling,
well that looks fine,
and it's certainly better than something like the iPhone.
That actually is pretty impressive
what you can get out of even just five times zoom.
So if I zoom into something like 30 times,
it doesn't look super impressive,
until you jump out to the wide angle
and see just how far away you are.
It is not a perfect setup,
and I think the fact they put that
100 times space zoom on the back,
is a little bit disingenuous.
But I think there's no doubt that this is one of the best
zoom cameras on any phone that you can get.
"Austin, they hyped the cameras on this thing,
"and I mean they hyped the cameras.
"So my question,
"how does this $1000 plus phone,
"compare with the point and shoot camera
"like an RX100 or G5X"?
It is good, but it is not as good.
So I took a couple of sample stills,
I will show you guys right now.
So if you zoom in on a shot like this on the RX100,
you'll see that it's really nice, you know,
you got a little bit of depth of field in the background,
plenty of detail.
Now if we switch over to the Samsung,
you can see that it does have that larger sensor.
And with the 108 megapixels and that huge sensor,
it actually does give us a little bit of depth of field,
especially when you go to the beard,
there's a lot of extra details I'm not really a huge fan of.
And if I switch over to the iPhone,
you'll see that it is just not quite as nice.
So I will say that the iPhone
does not sharpen things quite as much,
and this is only a single sample.
But on the other side,
what we're looking at here,
is something which white balance doesn't look quite as nice,
and the color looks to be fine,
but not particularly impressive.
So to sort of sum it up,
if you look at the Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra side by side
with an RX100, it gets reasonably close,
but it is not as good and there's still probably a good
couple year gap between them.
Especially considering that the RX100 has a much nicer lens.
There's a lot of stuff you can do in software
to make color and dynamic range look better.
At the end of the day,
so much of it does come down to that glass
that you put in front of the sensor,
and that's just simply not something
that you can really push smartphones that far on yet,
unless you wanna have like,
a lens like this pop out the back of your phone.
"Is the 8K video as good as the RED camera"?
So for context right now,
I am recording on an 8K RED camera.
Although to be fair,
the lens is much much nicer than on the S20,
and the color has been custom profiled for this location.
However, this is what it looks like
when we are recording 8k video on the Galaxy S20 Ultra.
Now we are recording it that same 24 frames per second,
however something I really noticed
is that when you go from 4k to 8k,
it gets really noisy.
So this is not exactly a dark environment,
but it is not a super high key
really sort of brightly lit one.
And as you can see on the RED, it handles it no problem.
There's essentially no noise and again,
we sort of custom built this entire set for the RED,
with the exact same settings,
you can see that while the 8K video isn't terrible,
it is certainly nowhere near as good as a true 8k camera.
"How about a low light photo comparison"?
So I had some time to take the S20 Ultra,
the Galaxy Z Flip, and the iPhone 11 Pro
out for a little photo test last night.
And generally speaking, the results are good.
Now I will say that I'm not a huge fan
of the way the Samsung night mode performs.
So some shots actually,
I will say didn't even want to kick into night mode.
And some of them looked quite nice.
But when you click into that night mode,
unlike something on the Pixel,
which I feel like generally speaking,
does a very very good job of kinda balancing a long exposure
with multiple and kind of merging it well.
The S20 Ultra would like, sit there and go oh,
I need a 10 second exposure.
And you can see a shot like this,
it just doesn't look as good as something like the iPhone
which only needed a couple of seconds to do it.
And a lot of that because
when you have such a long exposure,
gotta hold the phone exactly straight like 10 seconds.
It's difficult to get any kind of real detail there.
Now mind you in some other shots,
it is significantly better
than something like the iPhone or the Z Flip.
But for the most part, it's a little bit of a mixed bag.
I think that the iPhone and Pixel
may still have a slight edge in night mode,
but we'll see when I spend a little bit more time with it.
Generally speaking though,
it's good, not amazing.
"Is the selfie camera better than the normal
"and plus versions"?
So sadly, I only have the S20 Ultra and right now,
I will be getting my hands on the standard S20
probably in the next couple of weeks or so,
but I can compare it to again the iPhone,
as well as the Z Flip.
So let's see,
we put them all side by side,
I think it's pretty clear to say that the S20 Ultra wins.
Now I do slightly prefer the look of the iPhone
as far as color goes,
but the extra detail on the S20 Ultra
really is pretty apparent.
Although I'm not entirely sure how many people want
that much detail in their selfies maybe,
isn't that what beauty modes for,
Is to smooth things out?
"Can the S20 Ultra record 60 FPS
"with all three cameras like the iPhone 11 Pro"?
No.
So if I jump into the camera app,
when I'm on 4k 60,
it simply does not give me an option to zoom in or out.
Now if I jump into the settings
and switch it to say 4k 30,
you'll see that now, I have those options.
So while I'm recording, I can easily sort of jump in,
jump out, and it will work.
However at 4k 60,
you're stuck with just the standard angle camera.
"How significant of a difference does it have
"coming from the S10 or the S10 plus,
like does this really qualify for being Ultra?
So that's really the main question for this video, right?
With a $1400 price tag,
is the Galaxy S20 Ultra really worthy of that name?
I would say yes.
So while it is very expensive, it is very large,
but this is a ridiculously spec hungry monster, right?
I mean you've got 108 megapixel camera,
five times optical zoom, with 100 times space zoom,
5000 milliamp hour battery, fastest Snapdragon 865 processor
you get, you got 120 hertz display,
I mean, yes,
this really is about the most ridiculous overkill phone
I can think of,
and you have to pay the price for that.
So coming around to I guess the beginning of this video,
is the Galaxy S20 Ultra worth it?
It depends.
Are you a person who just wants a good solid smartphone,
with decent cameras?
The standard S20 or iPhone or OnePlus,
there is a lot of other options which will be just fine,
right?
This is not for you.
The S20 Ultra is only worth it if you're one of those nerds
who really wants the absolute max.
And I don't say nerd in a bad way, right?
If you really want that ultimate experience,
the Ultra does deliver something that you just can't get
on any other phone right now.
The cameras are quite good, the battery is massive.
There is just a lot to like with this phone.
So if that's what you are interested in,
if you really want the ultimate, the max, the most,
I mean sure, I might be perfectly happy with the Z Flip,
and just sort of the form factor of it,
but at the price, you are getting much less specs,
you are getting much less of pretty much everything,
just besides the novelty.
Whereas the S20 Ultra really does deliver ridiculous
overkill performance.
So I'm curious,
what do you guys think about the S20 Ultra?
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