Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra Full Review in Detail

 What you're watching here, is that the Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra. And, there is a lot happening . It is big, it has 5G,108 megapixel camera, four other cameras, a huge screen, a high refresh rate, a 1399 dollar starting price. It's just tons . If there is a spec that you simply can consider for a phone, this phone is trying to beat that spec. The S20 Ultra goes big, I mean you recognize , literally big, check out the phone. and searching at it I feel one thing is blindingly obvious. Samsung seems like it's something to prove.

Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra Full Review in Detail

Let's examine if it can. the simplest word that I can come up with to explain the S20 Ultra is, imposing. it's this giant, giant camera bump on the rear which some times are often a drag on a table. But look, the thing seems like a Galaxy phone overall. Just quite taken to the limit. it's as large and nearly as heavy as just about any phone that I've ever used. it is a monolith. It sees your puny attempts at employing a phone one handed and it laughs at you. Now the most reason this phone is as big because it is is in order that you'll have this screen which is 6.9 inches diagonally. and since this screen doesn't have a face unlock sensor thereon , it can cover nearly the whole front of the phone. Now I figured that I'd be annoyed at having to travel back to an in-screen fingerprint sensor rather than face unlock,but i actually wasn't. The sensor is fast and accurate enough on behalf of me , so I've got no complaints. But the important reason i feel that this screen shows that Samsung has something to prove with the S20 Ultra, is that they finally added the choice to modify it to 120 hertz refresh rate. Now, it comes outta the box at 60 hertz to save lots of battery but I hopped into settings and turned it on directly and never looked back because i feel it's 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 supported the content of the screen nonsense. It's just locked to 120. Oh, by the way, you cannot have both 120 hertz and therefore the phone's maximum 3200 by 1440 resolution. But, i feel the trade for 1080 by 2300 to urge 120 hertz is completely worthwhile . And in fact , the screen looks great. Looks great indoors, outdoors, at different angles, with HDR content. Samsung knows the way to do that by now, it's extremely good at it. And again, because it's nearly seven inches diagonally, it's 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's no better place to start out talking about what meaning , than to only jump right into the most important 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 sole camera that may not out of bounds megapixel wise is that the ultra wide which is 12 megapixels. But the S20 goes further than that. So almost like what Huawei did on it's phones, the zoom lens here actually hits a prism and a mirror and redirects the sunshine across the body of the phone into the sensor, sort of a periscope. It means the phone can get real optical zoom all the high to 4x, and something specialized up to 10x. Then there's this thing that Samsung calls Space Zoom, which pushes the zoom all the answer to 100x. That's one among the explanations that Samsung went with a 48 megapixel camera on the telephoto, in order that it's more pixels to settle on from when it starts cropping in. It also does this thing whereit takes multiple photos to assist get data from all the sensors to assist . So how does all that tech work? Well I tested this zoom against the iPhone 11 Pro, and therefore the Pixel 4 XL, both which have telephoto lenses. And for fun, I threw within the Sony RX100 VII. The Pixel 4 XL maxes at 8x zoom, so I just compared it at that level and that i used a tripod for all of those photos that you are looking at. i feel the RX100 wins, but you recognize , it is a stand alone camera so in fact it's gonna. once you just check out the phones, the S20 Ultra embarrasses the iPhone, and that i think it edges out the Pixel 4 too. thus far so good, but what about this Space Zoom thing? Well, you'll impress your friends with little whoa moments by zooming all the way into 100x, but truthfully, i feel they appear like splotchy messes at that zoom level. i used to be ready to get some fairly nice stuff at 30x, usually by propping the phone on something stable. But, it still seems like a phone photo to me. Okay, but what about just regular, plain old, non-zoom photos?

Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra Full Review in Detail

Well, Samsung is performing 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 is 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 a number of the standard problems that you simply get with high megapixel sensors. Like bad low light, and noise. It mostly works. See, so as to form all of this pixel binning stuff happen, Samsung still has got to do tons within the software. Now, generally i feel the S20 wants to smooth lighting especially on faces, it wants to stay things bright, and it wants to shift towards less red tones. and people are often specialized instincts for photos. So, for instance , i feel the shot of Alex looks great. And this purple plant thing, it's intense in only the proper way. But then, Samsung sometimes steers the S20's tuning just a touch too far.

So, compared to the iPhone, or the Pixel, this photo of me is simply plain over smoothed and over brightened. it's actually super weird. As soon because the S20 camera sees a face, it brings up the shadows an excessive amount of it smooths skin an excessive amount of ,and it tries way too hard to regulate the white balance and sometimes gets it wrong. Turn your head 45 degrees where it doesn't see a face, and it's fine. activate pro mode, and it's fine again. activate Bix by Scene Optimizer, and well, okay Bix by makes it worse, but still. during 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 is no setting that you simply can change to vary the default behavior of what this thing does with faces. The weirdest part though, none of this is applicable to the selfie camera. Which is great. Now Samsung also let's you're taking full on, 108 megapixel photos, and there is yet more camera tech involved during this like re mosaic but rock bottom line is you would like tons of sunshine to urge an honest photo at that resolution. And even then, my 108 megapixel photos were noisy enough within the fine details once I cropped in, that I never really saw the purpose . Now, when it involves low light photos, Samsung is doing better than it ever has, partly because the sensors are so big here. But it still features a lot of labor to try to to to catch up to the Pixel 4. And on portrait, again,better than it ever has, but it still features a lot of labor to try to to to catch up to the iPhone. The selfie camera though,which is 40 megapixels, is my favorite camera on this complete phone. It doesn't do an equivalent bad over smoothing on faces, I just adore it. Finally, I hate to inform you this, but as was common with every phone that we try, the ultra wide camera is that the worst of the three cameras in terms of quality. Things kinda just recover from sharpened as a results of a meh sensor. i assume the iPhone quite beats the S20 here, but nothing is basically good. Now as for video, the headline feature is that you simply can shoot and edit in 8K, and that i dunno, i feel that's kinda gimmicky but I do like that you simply can pull a still photo out. More important to me is that the slightly improved video stabilization 'cause have pretty shaky hands, but you ought to know that that also doesn't add 4K and definitely not in 8K. Last and you recognize what,definitely not least, is I saw this thing looking for focus tons . Especially once I was shooting video. I also adore 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 would not depend upon it for love or money important 'cause the standard is like, not that good. So, that's tons . it is a lot of camera which is sensible 'cause this camera bump is so huge right? I mean, okay. Where do i feel it all lands? Well, i feel Samsung features a bit more work to try to to on it's photo algorithms. i feel it's gonna take a moment for them to find out the way to take all of those huge megapixel counts and switch them into something that basically works in every single context. Especially with faces.

Now the S20 phones are the very first main stream 5G phones. There are a couple of before, but they've never been the default and with the S20 line they're . Now you ought to know that only the S20 Ultra and therefore the S20 Plus support the super high speed milli meter wave-5G that you simply can really only get at sort of a few street corners. But, all of them support the marginally slower, but far more widespread mid band 5G. So, okay, here's the state of 5G in ny City. On T-Mobile's mid band, i used to be ready to pull anywhere from like 45 down, which isn't much faster than LTE, up to 120 megs per second during a pretty great place . That's real fast. But it isn't as fast as what I could get on Verizon's milli meter wave, where I saw download speeds hit over 1300 Mbps. Which is incredible. I got that on one corner ,if I held my phone right, and that i didn't turn my body around. and that i didn't walk half a block away. And if i used to be lucky because sometimes it might sink to LTE anyway therein spot. Yeah, that's 5G for ya. It's just not fully ready yet. do not buy this phone simply because it is a 5G phone. In fact, do not buy any phone simply because it is a 5G phone. (upbeat music) Samsung always boasts the simplest possible specs for an Android phone on the Galaxy S line, and this year is not any different. But what's different this year, is that i feel a few of these specs could actually matter for people. I'm not talking about the Snapdragon 865 processor, which obviously is fast but it isn't during a way that i feel people are really gonna notice over the 855. What I mean are things just like the battery. It's 5000 milli amps here, which is large 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 used to be 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 counting on which model you purchase which means apps close less often within the background and ready to start you'll even pin apps to memory which suggests that Android won't be able to close them within the background. This might sound sort of a weird computer user feature, but let's be honest this is often a weird computer user phone. Samsung is additionally sticking to it's guns by offering expandable storage and it isn't keeping the headphone jack. And it's okay to be sad that , don't let anybody tell you different. the opposite side of performance is software, and for the foremost part Samsung is doing a solid job with One UI on top of Android 10. I still love it , but Samsung is beginning to Samsung it up a touch bit with feature creep. Everything that it'sever made remains here, and an excessive amount of of it's sitting within the settings tray and it's able to confuse you. There's Quick Share,which is like Air Drop but just for Galaxy phones. There's Link Share, which let's you throw stuff online for a personal link for people to download for each day or two. There's Music Share,which let's people with Galaxy phones play their music on the Bluetooth device that's paired to your Galaxy phone. But it isn't as weird as Samsung Daily which sits next to the house screen and just doesn't really offer useful cards for love or money . Or, as weird as Bixby which sits under an extended press of the facility button and it's still just Bixby. Overall, the experience on the S20 Ultra is sort of good, but it takes each day or two of dismissing prompts and turning off stuff that you simply don't need . Which is super annoying. So, Galaxy S20 Ultra. Did Samsung prove that it could make the simplest screen on a sensible phone? Yes it did. Did Samsung prove that it could make 5G a main stream feature for its phones? Well, yes it did but that does not mean that your city or your carrier has it. Did Samsung prove that it could throw every single performance spec possible into one phone? I mean, obviously it did. this is often Samsung. It also proved though that it's beginning to lose it's restraint a touch bit on software. But the most important thing that Samsung had to prove is that it could stay within the camera fight and do so with big megapixel sensors and zoom. and that i think on zoom, Samsung has proved that it's hardware can beat Google and Apple at around 8x,but it isn't magic enough to urge something great beyond that. I'm more worried about how the camera treats faces though,because i feel Samsung remains Samsung in' up a touch bit an excessive amount of there. Mostly though, Samsung proved that when it wants thereto can still go all out with the phone. I mean, they did call this the Ultra, which is differently of claiming tons . And yeah, this phone may be a lot. (evil laugh) That was dumb. tons of phone, many phone, numerous phone. Phones on phones. Mega phone. Mega phone, it's loud right. Huh? Thanks for watching. Like and subscribe.