- 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, a 1399 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 is trying to beat that spec.
The S20 Ultra goes big,
I mean you know, literally big, look at the phone.
And looking at it I think one thing is blindingly obvious.
Samsung feels like it has 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 sometimes can be a problem on a table.
But look, the thing looks like a Galaxy phone overall.
Just kind of taken to the limit.
It is as large and nearly as heavy
as pretty much any phone that I've ever used.
It's a monolith.
It sees your puny attempts at 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 is 6.9 inches diagonally.
And because this screen doesn't have
a face unlock sensor on it,
it can cover nearly the entire front of the phone.
Now I figured that I'd be annoyed
at having to go back to an in-screen fingerprint sensor
instead of face unlock, but I really wasn't.
The sensor is fast and accurate enough for me,
so I've got no complaints.
But the real reason I think that this screen
shows that Samsung has something to prove
with the S20 Ultra, is they finally 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 animations look better and smoother.
Samsung even says that it stopped bothering
with any variable refresh rate
based on the content of the screen nonsense.
It's just locked to 120.
Oh, by the way, you can't have both 120 hertz
and the phone's maximum 3200 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 nearly seven inches diagonally,
it looks good 'cause it's just huge.
But, look.
Samsung has already done the make the phone bigger
than everybody else thing.
That's not actually what the S20 Ultra is about.
It's about being bigger in every 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 just silly 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 ultra wide which is 12 megapixels.
But the S20 goes further than that.
So similar to what Huawei did 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 megapixel camera on the telephoto,
so that it has more pixels to choose from
when it starts cropping in.
It also does this thing where it takes multiple photos
to help get data from all the sensors to help.
So how does all that tech work?
Well I tested this zoom against the iPhone 11 Pro,
and the Pixel 4 XL, both which have telephoto lenses.
And for fun, I threw in the Sony RX100 VII.
The Pixel 4 XL maxes at 8x zoom,
so I just compared it at that level
and I used a tripod for all of these photos
that you're looking at.
I think the RX100 wins, but you know,
it's a stand alone camera so 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 what about 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 splotchy messes 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 like a phone photo to me.
Okay, but what about just regular,
plain old, non-zoom photos?
Well, Samsung is doing some weird tech stuff here too.
So, by default the 108 megapixel sensor
makes 12 megapixel images because the hardware
automatically combines nine pixels into one big pixel.
It's a process called binning.
And combined, those binned pixels
are about as big as what 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 make all of this pixel binning
stuff happen, Samsung still has to do a lot in the software.
Now, generally I think the S20 wants to smooth out
lighting especially on faces,
it wants to keep things bright,
and it wants to shift towards less red tones.
And those are often really good instincts for photos.
So, for example, I think the shot 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 balance and 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 Bixby makes 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 that it'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 camera tech involved in this
like re mosaicing but the bottom line
is you need a lot of light to get a decent photo
at that resolution.
And even then, my 108 megapixel photos
were noisy enough in the fine details 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 the sensors 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 camera on this entire phone.
It doesn't do the same bad over 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 kind of 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 can pull a still photo out.
More important to me is the slightly improved
video stabilization 'cause I have pretty shaky hands,
but you should know that that still doesn't
work in 4K and definitely not in 8K.
Last and you know what, definitely not least,
is I saw this thing hunting 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 weirdo camera 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 to take all of these huge
megapixel counts and turn 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 know that only the S20 Ultra
and the S20 Plus support the super high speed
millimeter wave-5G that you can really only get
at like a few street corners.
But, all of them support the slightly slower,
but much more widespread mid band 5G.
So, okay, here's the state of 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 second in 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 download speeds 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 to LTE anyway in that spot.
Yeah, that's 5G for ya.
It's just not fully ready yet.
Don't buy this phone just because it's a 5G phone.
In fact, don't buy any phone just because it's a 5G phone.
(upbeat music)
Samsung always boasts the 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 the Snapdragon 865 processor,
which obviously is fast but it's not in a way
that I think people are really gonna 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 full day 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 120 hertz 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 to close them in the background.
This might seem like a weird power user feature,
but let's be honest this is a 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 part Samsung 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 little bit with feature creep.
Everything that it's ever made is still here,
and too much of it is sitting 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, which let's you throw stuff
online for a private link for 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 offer useful 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 on the S20 Ultra is quite good,
but it takes a day or two 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.
Did Samsung prove that it could make 5G
a mainstream feature for phones?
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.
It also proved though that it's starting to lose
it's restraint a little bit on software.
But the biggest thing that Samsung had to prove
is that it could stay in the camera fight
and do so with big megapixel 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 a little bit too much there.
Mostly though, Samsung proved 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 of phone, so many phone.
Phones on phones.
Mega phone.
Mega phone, it's loud right.
Huh?
Thanks for watching.
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