- This is a Samsung Galaxy S22 Note.
I mean, Ultra, the Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra,
but it's also kind of the Galaxy S22 Note.
It's big. It's loaded with cameras.
And it comes with the stylus built-in.
Sounds like a note, right?
That's because Samsung has merged
the Note and the S-series phones,
making the S22 Ultra more or less the new Note.
That move gives the Ultra a distinct identity
in the S22 series,
more so than last year's S21 Ultra.
This isn't just a big phone with flagship specs.
It's a big phone with flagship specs, a stylus built-in
and a handful of other unique features.
And they won't appeal to everyone,
but they turn the Ultra into something very extra.
Do people still say extra?
(excitement music)
Without even turning the phone on,
it's obvious from the design
that the S22 Ultra has an identity separate from the S22.
It has a boxier shape,
which it inherited directly from the Note series.
And there's a curved rather than flat display.
As for the camera bump, well, there isn't one.
The Ultra's rear camera lenses are just there
protruding from the back of the phone.
It's a departure from the S22 and S22-plus design.
And once I got used to the idea of a phone
with no camera bump,
I have to admit, I kind of like it.
The spaces between lenses tend to trap
a little bit of dust in lens.
So you might need to get in there occasionally
with a cleaning cloth.
But who knows,
maybe 2022 is the year that we leave the camera bump behind
once and for all.
Probably not.
Of course, the S22 Ultra shares plenty of top-tier specs
with its fellow S22 flagships.
It has the same Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 processor,
IP68 weatherproofing,
and the latest Gorilla Glass Victus-plus
on the front and back.
It looks and feels every bit
that $1,200 flagship that it is.
Performance is excellent.
Switching between apps is quick.
And animations look buttery smooth
on that big 6.8 inch, 120 Hertz OLED display.
What doesn't feel quite flagship like
is the Ultra's battery life.
The phone includes a big 5,000 milliamp battery,
which it absolutely needs.
The downside to using a first generation chipset
and a huge bright display is
that it makes the S22 a very power-hungry device.
I got through a day of lighter use
with plenty of power to spare,
but it doesn't take a lot of effort
to push the battery below 20% by the end of the day.
If you're a power user,
you'll need to keep an eye on your battery percentage.
And that kind of sucks on a flagship phone.
But let's get back to the star of the show,
the stylus, or S Pen as Samsung calls it.
Just like with the Note series,
it pops out of a dedicated silo
built into the bottom of the phone.
When the phone is unlocked,
this brings up a menu of stylus-centric options
to do things like start a new note, or take a screen grab,
and write on the image.
Samsung says the S Pen is more responsive this year
with 70% lower latency.
It's tough to judge the accuracy of that claim.
It's measured in milliseconds,
but writing with the S Pen feels fluid and natural.
One of the Ultra's tricks is identifying handwriting
and converting it to text,
which is now supported in a dozen more languages.
And it's surprisingly good at translating my awful scribbles
into human-readable text.
Outside of these improvements,
there's not much that's new
about the S Pen or the stylus features
that the ultra supports.
If you're new to the stylus life,
it can take a minute
to get comfortable with all of its features.
You can also dial in settings to your liking,
such as how long it waits
after you've stopped writing to convert your text.
It's a powerful set of features.
Once you get the hang of it,
especially if you've been hanging on
to an aging Note 9 or 10,
but be prepared to spend some time
getting a feel for things if you're new to the S Pen.
Now let's talk cameras.
These aren't exactly the same sensors and lenses
as the S21 Ultra, but the differences are minor.
Samsung is touting big improvements,
mainly when shooting in portrait mode in low light.
The company says that subject detection is now more precise
in portrait mode.
And that low-light imagery is more detailed.
Thanks to AI improvements.
And you know what,
it's actually made good on these promises.
The differences are subtle, but they're mostly good
and occasionally great.
Let's look at portrait mode first.
Samsung says that its depth mapping can now identify details
as small as individual hairs on your subject,
precisely identifying subjects and separating them
from the background.
It means a tricky feat for smartphones.
And it's one of the ways
you can usually tell a smartphone portrait
from one taken with a larger camera.
Samsung hasn't perfected this quite yet.
If you look close at this one,
you can see where it gets tripped up
around the subject's beard.
But overall, the portraits that are taken with the S22 Ultra
are some of the best most convincing images
I've seen from a phone so far.
The phone really does handle fine detail like hair better,
both on humans and pets,
which are now officially supported portrait subjects,
by the way.
Portrait mode images from the standard wide camera
still look artificial.
They're just trickier to pull off,
but photos from the three times telephoto in good lighting
look great.
The transition between sharp
and blurred parts of the image is smooth.
And it isolates individual strands of my hair
rather than just smoothing them over and calling it a day.
Next up, that 10 times optical zoom.
It's not new. The S21 Ultra had one too.
But it's still much more reached
than the typical three times and four times
till a photo camera is on other flagships,
and something you'll only get on the Ultra model,
not on the standard S phones.
As far as telephoto lenses on smartphones go, it's not bad.
It's stabilized, which is a huge help,
keeping your shot steady.
You can go beyond 10 times up to 30,
and even 100 times digital zoom.
But image quality goes downhill real fast
the farther you go out.
You don't have to look too hard
to see where it comes up short
versus a traditional camera with a zoom lens,
but photos at 10 times,
and even 30 times zoom and good light,
are definitely passable for social media.
You won't always have good lighting to work with.
So that's where
Samsung's night imagery improvements come in.
Samsung is trying to call this nightography,
but let's just stick with night photography.
Now you can capture full 108 megapixel images
with night mode.
Previously, you could either use one or the other,
but not both at the same time.
The results in extremely low light are impressive.
Night mode doesn't make much of a difference
in dim lighting,
but in near darkness,
high-res photos look much less noisy with better color.
Overall though, low-light photography is
still a little hit or miss in terms of quality,
especially if you're photographing a moving subject
like an infant.
You can take a portrait mode, night selfie now
in really dark conditions, which seems impressive
but their results are not great.
High-res night mode has some interesting applications
for landscape photographers,
but these aren't features I would use very often.
And I suspect most people wouldn't either.
Samsung hasn't exactly revolutionized
night photography here, just slightly improved it.
The Ultra also supports a new camera app called Expert RAW.
Now this gets a little complicated.
While you can still take a regular single frame RAW image
with the native camera app,
the Expert RAW app captures data from multiple frames
and combines them into one RAW file.
The resulting image has less noise than a single frame RAW
and, like traditional RAW images,
can be manipulated in photo editing software.
There is a shortcut to edit directly on your phone
with Samsung's Lightroom app.
But you can easily export the photos to edit them
on the software of your choice.
It's not something I'd use all of the time,
but it is more useful
than a traditional single frame RAW file from a smartphone.
The S22 Ultra ships with One UI 4.1,
which is Samsung's take on Android 12.
It introduces new customization options,
like the ability to change the system-wide color palette
to match your wallpaper.
You can apply this change to things
like Control Panel buttons
and opt to expand it to app icons.
I find that kind of jarring.
So I stuck with the System Controls, and the effect is nice.
As intended, it does actually make the phone feel
a little more me.
So job well done, Google and Samsung.
The S22 Ultra is a really good phone
that lives up to its name by piling on the extras,
like the S Pen, a decent 10 time zoom,
and some new low-light photography options.
These are all decidedly niche features.
So if one or more of those really appeal to you,
then you'll be very happy with the Ultra,
because there's just no other device
that does all of those things.
But if you're just mildly curious about the zoom lens
or the stylus,
you'd probably be better off saving a couple hundred bucks
and going with the S22-plus.
2022 may not actually be the year
that the camera bump disappears.
It's definitely not the year
of the night photography revolution.
But it is the year that
Samsung established the Ultra model
of its mainstream S series as something different.
It's no longer just the bigger, beefier spec model
of a trio of flagship phones.
It has a few distinct offerings that add up to a device
unlike anything else on the market.
Ultra, indeed.
Hey, thanks for watching.
I'm at home recording this
on the Ultra's built-in selfie camera and microphone.
It's not exactly night photography,
but let me know what you think about the image quality
in the comments.