S21 Ultra vs Note 20 Ultra: Older is Better and Cheaper? By Max Tech

This video is brought to you by Squarespace the best way to make an amazing website. Hey guys, it's max. We just got in the brand-new galaxy s21 ultra, and today we're going to do a full, detailed comparison against the note 20 ultra and find out if it's worth spending hundreds of dollars more for this brand-new phone or, if you just get the note, we're not only going to compare the exterior differences, comfort and hand and specs but other things, such as the brand-new display with higher brightness and refresh rates, the new fingerprint sensor, the brand new 5g chip, the cameras and much more now. The first thing that I noticed is the design difference. It almost looks like there's: two different companies designing this phone on the back. The thing that really stands out are the camera bumps.

The s21 looks huge with all these cutouts. Now we will be looking at cameras today in this video, but we're also doing a blind camera comparison. Those are always a ton of fun, not knowing which camera shot which photo and choosing which one looks best. So if you guys want to see that click that subscribe button below and with that, you guys can help us reach 600 000 subscribers before March, which is our two-year mark. That would be amazing.

Now, in my opinion, the note 20 looks a lot more premium and more elegant. I've been using the s21 for about a day now, and it just looks almost like it's dated like we're going back in time. We have the standard kind of curve design with the standard edges, whereas the note 20 ultra you have this super slim frame here with the curved glass and then these flat tops. So in the hand I love resting, my finger on it and with that it also feels much thinner than the s21 which feels chunky, and it feels heavier. At the same time and overall I will say that the note 20 is a little more comfortable in the hand and now let's go ahead and compare the fingerprint sensors, as you guys can see, the fingerprint icon right here is a little larger because we do have a new sensor, and it's supposed to be a little faster, more reliable.

So let's go and test that out, I'm going to do just one by one, so as you guys can see as soon as I put it down bam, that is nice and quick, no problems there. Let's try this one all right press a little longer. Let me hold still really, really fast. Let's test them at the same time, all right, so the s21 is slightly faster screen's off about the same all right. So then the note 20 didn't turn on there all right.

So it looks like if everything is working perfectly your fingers in the correct position they're about the same, maybe just slightly faster on the new s21, but there you go, it didn't go off again. You just have a little more leeway with the new s21 now. The next thing that we're going to cover are the displays and man. This might be the biggest reason to go for the new s21 ultra, but before we take a look at all the differences, let me give a shout-out to the sponsor of this video Squarespace. If you've been thinking about making your own website, Squarespace is seriously the best way to go.

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You will save 10 off your first purchase of a website or domain, and now, let's compare the displays now looking at both of these, I can't really tell a difference in terms of sharpness or detail, even though the s21 does have a little higher resolution. But with that said right now I have the s21 in 120 hertz mode, whereas the note 20 is only at 60 hertz, and that is because when we go into the settings, and we go into the display- and we turn on the adaptive motion- it actually won't. Let you do that unless you turn down your resolution from that nice crisp high-end 1440p down to 1080p, and now that I have 120 hertz on both. Yes, I can tell a difference. The text on the note 20 looks a little soft and there's almost a little of I don't know weirdness around the edges, because it has to change the resolution.

It's not matching up to the display, and because of that I mostly ran the note 20 in at 60 hertz mode in the kids do both at the same time, which is awesome and you guys can see the smoothest difference in the slow motion clips. How much smoother 120 hertz is compared to 60. It's a really noticeable difference and there are more differences than that. So Samsung is using a newer display technology and the s21 can go all the way down to 10 hertz, meaning when we're just sitting here. It doesn't have to refresh at 120 or even 60 or 30, and that saves you battery life with that.

The viewing angles are also a little better as well and there's a little less blue shift, but it's not a huge difference and as far as brightness, we also have a difference here. You guys see I maxed out both of them and the top camera. I went ahead and turned that down, so it doesn't blow out the screens, and you can tell that the s21 is brighter. Now it has a peak brightness of up to 1500 nits, which is crazy. We'll test out a HDR video here in a second, but when you max it out manually, it won't reach that you have to be outside in auto mode, but anyways you'll get a little brighter.

Now the standout feature of the note series has always been the s pen where you can have it stored right inside the phone there you pull it out. You get a little pop-up and there's a bunch of different things. You could do you can create notes, or you could just doodle this one's AR doodle, and you've always needed to buy a note for that. But now with the s21 for the first time, you can actually use an s-pen. Now, as you guys could see, it actually does work with one that came from a note, but they do have an additional one that they sell right now.

It is currently sold out. The only downside if you want to use it is that there is nowhere to store inside the phone itself, so you're either going to have to put in your pocket or get one of those cases that have a little spot for it. And now, let's put these OLA displays to the real test. I have some 4k HDR footage here. There was a s21 update this morning, so both can play this back at 1440p and with that they fixed the HDR, and now it is nice and bright and vibrant and, as you guys could see, it is actually better than the note 20.

It looks a little sharper to my eyes. The highlights are a little brighter and the same thing kind of goes for the contrast, or at least it's very close. So as far as HDR video, the new s21 is definitely a better experience. But with that said what about the speakers? So let's go ahead and compare them. Please go get a pair of headphones.

If you have some, so you guys can hear the differences and, let's take a listen, started all right guys. Let me know your thoughts down in the comment section below. I want to hear your guy's opinion now. As far as what I heard man, they were so similar. This might have been the closest I've ever heard in terms of phones.

Now there were a few differences. The note 20 is a little louder and the highs are a little brighter, which probably is what makes it louder, where the s21 has a little more bass and a little more of richness in the mid, but it's also slightly quieter. But overall, I don't think anybody will complain with either one and now, let's compare the 5g speeds, I'm going to go ahead and click go they're both connected to the same server, the same tower and the reason I'm doing this test is that the new s21 ultra has the new snapdragon x60, which is a five nanometer chip. It's supposed to be faster, but, as you guys can see, that was a big difference right there, this one's still downloading, but the speed did hit higher now with the faster speeds. It also is supposed to sip a lot less power or use a lot less power.

Furthermore, it looks like now we're going for the upload test, and they're roughly the same. So this is the second time we're doing this test. We did it with the iPhone and both times the s21 is slower, which is weird now. The weird thing is that the s21 is showing LTE on the actual speed test app. So I went ahead, and I ran this again and, as you can see, the results are fairly similar to the first time now.

Both are showing 5g in our speed test app. So, so far this is fairly consistent. I want to go ahead and do one more run here, but this time I'll let these run one at a time to make sure there's no interference or anything like that and bam. Look at that now. The s21 is hitting those nice high speeds, and we are in a concrete building right now, so it'd be much faster outside and let's see what the note 20 could do running by itself and bam, we're reaching those high speeds and actually a little faster.

Oh now, it's cutting down, never mind, so it does look like for some reason. The note 20 is faster, so we have 138 compared to 101 and 101. Isn't bad you'll still get great speeds with the s21 as long as you're, not right next to a note, 20 user pulling data? At the same time? Now, let's get into processor and graphics performance? I have geek bench 5 opened up right here, and it's interesting to see that the frequencies are actually slightly higher on the note 20 ultra. So let's go ahead and run geek bench 5 and one big difference between these two is that the new s21 ultra uses a five nanometer processor, so it should be more energy, efficient and more powerful. We have the 888 over here compared to the 865 plus, so we have a result, and I have to say that this is kind of embarrassing.

I was expecting a much bigger difference now sure on the single core that is about 14, but we're not only talking about a half year difference. This is a whole architecture, change going down to five nanometers and all the on the multi-core. That is literally a five percent improvement, so it definitely is not worth buying the s21 ultra for the performance gains, at least in CPU. Now, where I'm really curious is for gaming, so let's go and switch over and do a graphics test. We have GFX bench open, I'm going to select the car chase scene, we're going to be able to watch the performance difference as we're going.

So let's go ahead and hit start. Let's flip these, the s21 loaded, it quite a bit quicker, and now, let's see if we notice any performance differences honestly, both are looking pretty smooth. There's a few sections where I can notice some dropped frames, but it's not as big of a difference, as I expected, of course, in a second here, we're going to know the actual results and the frames per second that we got all right. We have a result and wow okay. I guess my eyes were correct.

We have 29 frames per second compared to 34, so that is super close, pretty much an insignificant difference and I did notice a few drop frames like I mentioned, but almost the whole time it was just as smooth. So that is also unfortunate that we're not getting much performance difference with this brand-new flagship processor. Now there still is one major benefit with the snapdragon 888 and the new x60 modem, and that is battery life. So I've only used the s21 for about a day, but the battery life has been awesome and from what I've seen online you'll get about two to three hours better screen on time compared to the note 20, and that is with having that 120 hertz on or if you shut, both of them off. So the battery life is absolutely incredible, and now it's finally time to talk about the cameras now, both these are flagships.

They have crazy, 108, megapixel sensors. We have 40 megapixels, front-facing sensors, here's a selfie shot with the beauty mode turned off you guys. Let me know which one looks better down below, but the most interesting thing for me is the telephoto cameras. So not only do we have this crazy, 10x zoom, which is now 10x optical zoom, compared to five times, but the s21 also has a new three times optical zoom camera. Now I figured that that extra camera is probably great for macro shots, but take a look at this and you guys.

Let me know your thoughts, but to me using the digital crop on that 108 megapixel sensor actually looks better on the note 20 ultra, and my next thought was that it could be used for portrait shots instead of having digital crop, but no, both of them still use that main 108 megapixel shooter, and you guys, let me know which one of these portraits look better to you now, of course, there's so much to cover in terms of camera. We also have 8k video. We have stabilization a ton of stuff. So that's why we're doing that blind camera comparison? I'm going to go out and shoot a bunch of photos today and then Vadim and angelica are gonna, guess, which one looks better, and we'll know. Is it the more mature product with lots of software updates or this new phone with a little of hardware changes, make sure you guys enable those notifications down below and now? Let's talk about the value and my final verdict on which one I would personally buy as far as prices, the new s21 ultra, it is 1200 bucks, so I actually dropped about 200 bucks compared to last year, which is great and the note 20 it was 1300 with that said, there are some killer sales right now I'll leave some links down in the video description.

You can pick one of these up for about a thousand dollars, and I've actually seen them slightly less than that compared to full price of 1200. Not only that, with the note 20, you actually can add a micro SD card, so you can expand your storage without having to pay extra out of the gate, which is awesome and Samsung ditched that with the s21 and to make matters worse. The s21 also doesn't come with the charging brick which the note 20 does include and then, of course, even though you have support for the s pen with s21, it actually comes with the note 20, and you have that nice little convenient slot to store it in and to top it all off the things that I was most excited about with the s21 ultra, which is the new snapdragon 5 nanometer chips and the new modem. Well, the performance isn't that much better and the actual 5g was slightly slower for some reason. So with that said, there is absolutely no way that I personally would choose the s21 ultra over the note 20.

The note 20 feels better in the hand it is lighter, it looks so much more premium, and it costs less money now. The only one thing that I wish it could do is have that high resolution with that 120 hertz display refresh rate um. Who knows if that ever will happen? It probably won't, but it is a trade-off. You can switch back and forth if you want other than that. This is still a great performing phone, and it looks awesome, and it works great.

So you guys, let me know your thoughts down in the comment section below. I guess the only way the s21 could redeem itself is with amazing photo quality and, of course we will be testing that out soon, so click that circle above, if you guys want to see that blind camera comparison, and also with that you can help us reach 600k subs before March, which is our two-year mark. That would be absolutely amazing. Go ahead and check out one of those videos over there. This been max, and I will see you in the next video.

Source : Max Tech