Galaxy S20 Ultra Review: Too much of a good thing By Android Central

The galaxy s, 20 Ultra is one of the most important phones of the year, but compared to the Galaxy Z Flip that launched alongside it. It's also sort of boring the s20 ultra doesn't fold in half to become more compact or fold out into a big tablet, but it absolutely nails the fundamentals and, of course you get this gigantic new camera system. So let's talk about whether you should spend $1400 on Samsung's latest flagship, something you're, either gonna, love or hate, depending on who you are, is just how giant the galaxy s 20 ultra really is its one of the biggest and heaviest phones around coming in at 220 grams. It isn't quite as heavy as the iPhone 11 Pro Max or some Huawei flagships, but it certainly feels the part, and you're going to notice this in your hands and pocket. That being said, it's also incredibly well-built Samsung's, gotten perfect at hardware design over the last few years and the s20 ultra feels like a tank. It's got a glass and metal design with less pronounced curves around the edges than before, which actually feels a lot better.

If you ask me- and it means that there will be fewer accidental presses, except the giant camera bump around the back, the design actually hasn't changed all that much since the Galaxy S 10, you get a slightly smaller camera cutout and tighter bezels around the display, but otherwise this is pretty familiar Samsung in all the right ways. Of course, there's still great features like ip68 water resistance and reverse wireless charging. The only thing that's really missing this time around is a headphone jack, which I'm sure some of you will miss much more than others. If you ask me, though, one of the s20 ultras the best new features is its display. Yes, it's giant, and the colors are gorgeous, and it's just great to look at whether you're, creating or consuming content, but more important to me is the new 120 Hertz refresh rate Samsung's skipped the 90 Hertz train and went straight to doubling its 60 Hertz panels, and the result is just an incredibly smooth experience, whether you're scrolling through lists and apps, or playing supported games like Microsoft's Fora, one of the s20 ultras exclusive launch titles.

If you're used to 60 Hertz panels already, then this might not seem like a big deal to you, but if we don't prove the everyday experience of the phone. Another big change on the s20 ultra is the move to 5g Samsung is using Qualcomm snapdragon 865 chipsets in the s20 series, which features support for both sub 6 and millimeter wave 5g networks through its ex 55 modem in plain English. That means that you'll get 5g on the s20 ultra anywhere it's available on any carrier that supports it. The problem is: it's still not really available in many places in Brooklyn, where we tested the s20 ultra, we were able to find small pockets of 5g here and there on Verizon's network, but that raises another issue. Millimeter-Wave 5g, like the kind you'll find on Verizon's network, still isn't cut out for consumers.

It's great, and I mean really truly great for speed test demos, where you can hit all the way up to 2 gigabits per second, but as soon as you take a few steps forward, or even turn in the wrong direction, that 5g signal could disappear. I'm. A much bigger fan of sub 6 5g technologies, but unfortunately we weren't able to test those on the s20 ultra. Then there's the issue of battery drain.5G is pretty significant in that regard, and so is the new 120 Hertz refresh rate. Now the 865 processor is pretty power efficient and the galaxy s.20 Ultra is packing a massive five thousand William hour battery, but even so we were reaching single digit battery percentages by the end of some days, which isn't quite what we were hoping for now. That being said, we've heard from plenty of other reviewers that battery life on their units has actually been pretty great, even with 120 Hertz enabled, so your mileage may vary, but at the very least, this should still be enough to get you through a full day, even with heavy usage.

Now the software experience in the galaxy s, 20 ultra, is pretty similar to other recent Samsung devices. This is the same version of Android 10, with Samsung's 1 UI 2, with some small additions, like the new music share, feature that lets your friends connect to your phone over Bluetooth, then stream, music. To any speakers, you're already connected to Samsung is also partnered, with Google to integrate duo, video calling straight into the phone dialer. This is undoubtedly to give Android users a similar experience to FaceTime on the iPhone and the Galaxy S 20 Ultra is the first phone to support 1080p video streams during video calls. So we should talk about the cameras, because that's really the biggest new change with the galaxy s 20 ultra, you get four cameras in the giant housing on the back of this phone, and each of them has a larger sensor size than last year.

Specifically, the main sensor is three times larger than before, and it comes in at a hundred and eight megapixels compared to last year's twelve. That's a massive leap in resolution, so Samsung is using nine to one pixel binning. To still give you a 12 megapixel output that pixel binning, combined with the larger sensor, means that every photo you take is sharper and brighter than ever before, and the depth of field coming out of shots taken straight from the normal shooting mode are insane. There's a ton of natural both and the focal plane is so narrow that even shooting rounded objects like a cup can lead to some out-of-focus text around the sides. It's pretty insane to think that these kinds of photos can come from a phone and not a pocket.

Camera there's really no need to use portrait mode anymore. Since you get a much more natural look out of the regular camera and as an added bonus, you get to avoid all the artificial cutouts around your subject now. That being said, this is still a Samsung camera with all of Samsung's camera quirks. The s20 ultra absolutely refuses to let shadows be dark, lifting the exposure on the entire photo and oftentimes blowing out the highlights. As a result, there's also a ton of over sharpening going on with pretty much every photo, and you can get a really nasty haloing effect around objects that are too brightly lit.

Now you also have the option of shooting at the full 108 megapixel resolution instead of pixel bending down to 12 megapixels, but you lose out on a ton of brightness and sharpness and of course the file is much, much larger, so I'm not sure how often I would really recommend doing that. Of course, this isn't even touching on the rest of the cameras, the ultra white has been improved by quite a lot with the larger sensor, to the point that it's almost as good as the main sensor on last year's as 10. On the other hand, the telephoto has been completely redesigned with this new periscope layout with the camera so large that they actually had to lay it sideways. On the inside of the phone, then bounce light off of a prism to get the image into the sensor. Samsung advertises a 10x hybrid optic zoom, with this telephoto camera, with the ability to zoom in up to a hundred times digitally.

If that sounds ridiculous and impractical, it sort of is, but you also get photos, unlike what almost any other phone can take. It's hard to explain just how far a hundred times zoom can get you, but here's a shot taken from Williamsburg in Brooklyn with Samsung's 100x space zoom. You can go all the way across the East River and identify various signs and buildings in Manhattan. The photo results at 100x aren't that useful you're, certainly not gonna Instagram these shots, but the fact that you can even get that close and still see discernible details is pretty shocking. The real useable photos comes somewhere between 4x + 10 X, where you can actually get some pretty great looking photos.

These aren't the throw always that you get on most 2x telephoto zooms. These are actually good, looking photos with again some pretty natural-looking depth of field. It's pretty shocking. Just how good almost every focal length on the galaxy s 20 Ultra is that we did run into one majorly annoying problem. The galaxy s.20 ultra has a lot of trouble with autofocus, whether you're shooting photo or video. The s20 ultra has a tendency to pulse in and out of focus, especially while shooting in low-light.

This is probably because, unlike the s 20 and s, 20 plus the galaxy s, 20 ultra uses phase detect autofocus rather than the faster dual pixel Samsung says: it'll, be issuing a fix for the autofocus issues in a software update coming soon, but until it does, this is a pretty frustrating shooting experience with an otherwise outstanding camera arrangement. So the front-facing camera supports 4k video at up to 60 frames, a second. If you're shooting at 60, you do lose video effects and stabilization. If you step it down to 30, you get that stabilization back, but again, no video effects with the rear cameras. You can shoot it all the way up to 8k, though, of course you lose stabilization in the process, and these are absolutely massive files in general, you're, better off shooting in 1080p or 4k.

But if you want to shoot 8k and share it online, you can upload a 8k directly to YouTube from the phone or downscale your footage in the gallery for a more shareable file size. This is also one of the first times I've been happy to use a Sam's camera in low-light I. Still don't love night mode which often tries to take way too long of an exposure for handheld shots, but even in auto mode, you can get surprisingly bright and sharp photos that are by far and away better than anything we saw on the s10. So, let's wrap all this up by talking about who exactly the galaxy s 20 ultra is for starting at $1,400 and going up even higher. If you want more storage and 16 gigabytes of RAM, its Samsung's most expensive non-folding phone, and not everyone can take advantage of some of its newer features like 5g.

That being said, this is one of the most powerful phones on the market and even with its autofocus issues, the cameras are incredibly impressive, with sharpness and natural depth of field rivaling, that of even some dedicated cameras like the Sony rx100. If you have the money to spare, and you're looking for the best phone money can buy, this is about as good as it gets. Of course, you can also downsize to the galaxy s 20 or s.20, plus, and you'll, get just about everything. The s 20 ultra has to offer ? the 108 megapixel main camera, and the hundred X telephoto make sure you stay tuned here on YouTube for our full reviews of the other s, xx variants and check out android central. com for our more complete thoughts on the s20 ultra thanks a bunch for watching, and we'll see you next time.

Source : Android Central