Samsung Galaxy Note 20 Ultra After 2 Weeks: Camera King? By Danny Winget

What's up everybody: this is Danny and this is the Galaxy Note.20 ultra 5g and I've been using this phone for the last two weeks and I want to share with you my experience with it from the new design, the screen, the camera and, of course, the battery life. I want to answer the question: should you upgrade from your note, 10 plus, and how does this differ from the galaxy s20 ultra? We got a lot to talk about, so let's go ahead and get started, the phone itself is held up perfectly fine. I have a very bad track record of dropping the phones on the very first day, so I put a case on it immediately, but that doesn't stop me from appreciating the design. The glass on the display is one of the first phones with the new, stronger gorilla glass Vitus, and I don't have any scratches on it so far. So that's positive. The screen is fantastic, of course, bright with incredible colors and vibrancy, as you would expect from Samsung, but I do wish there was an option to run at 120 hertz at full resolution.

You're limited to full, HD plus and the feature is adaptive, so you can't force it to 120 hertz, but I really don't find myself being bothered by this on a day-to-day basis. I still think it should be an option that you can choose. The snapdragon, 865 plus processors, with 12 gigabytes of ram have been super solid, really fluid and no lag on the UI. I can't speak for the Enos version because I haven't used it yet, but the Qualcomm one is legit. I think we're to a point now, where flagship devices really don't have any performance issues anymore and for this price tag it really should perform well, and it doesn't disappoint and the good thing is.

It has every feature that I would want in a flagship like stereo speakers: ip68 water resistance, wireless charging, reverse wireless charging, fast charging micro, SD card slot for easy storage expansion up to one terabyte, but it has that one thing that has people buying this phone, and that is the s pen and I have to admit, I'm not an s pen warrior and I don't use it to his full potential. But I can see why people love this thing. There are new gestures this year and more features to make your productivity better, and I'm going to try to use this more during my long-term usage. But even though I don't use the pen religiously, I notice just how fast the s pen is this year. With this reduced latency I mean the old s: pen wasn't slow by any means, but this year it's a notable difference.

I can't detect any lag at all. It's a fantastic experience for people who take a lot of notes, especially students. I can see the audio notes feature being really helpful in education. I mean I wish I had this when I was in college. So the s pen is a major goal this year.

So the two biggest questions that I'm getting on social media is: how good is this monster camera system, and what's the battery life like from the 4 500 William hour battery? Well, let's start with the battery the galaxy s20 ultra had a 5 000 William hour battery, and I was getting great battery life from that phone and the note 20 ultra doesn't last as long, and I think that's to be expected. The battery life is very similar to the older note, 10, plus, with a smaller 4 300 William hour battery. So take that for what it's worth, I was definitely able to make it through a full day with about 10 to 15 left anywhere between five and six hours of screen on time. So the battery life isn't bad by any means, but I wouldn't expect a battery life champion. I wouldn't let this stop you from buying this phone, though, because battery life is super subjective, everyone uses their phone different and most people charge every night.

So it should last you a full day. Just don't expect it to go beyond that. So if you know these expectations, you should be fine. Okay, so maybe I'm weird, I really don't care about the big camera hump on the back, because most of us put cases on it anyway, so we're expecting a thicker experience, but what if Samsung made a phone that just evened out that camera bump and gave us something like a six or seven thousand William hour battery? That would last use a couple of days without charging. I think that would really hit- and I know, design wise.

Maybe manufacturers wouldn't like that thicker phone. But what about bringing the active line back and giving us that huge battery? I think that could work. Please Samsung could work all right. So let's talk camera. This camera system looks like it means business and, I'm happy to say it's pretty fantastic.

The 108 megapixel sensor looks to be the same one from the galaxy s20 ultra, but the good thing is that they added laser autofocus to improve the focusing accuracy and speed it's fast and accurate, especially for photos. So that's a huge win over the galaxy s20 ultra, but I think you can still use some optimization because in video it does have the tendency to hunt frequently and not that it goes out of focus. It just wants to aggressively make sure it's in focus, so I'm sure that can be improved and at night it does this too. So I hope they fix this in some future. Software updates.

The images especially during the day are really great. Pictures have incredible dynamic range. The colors are on the natural side, but still vibrant enough to be ready to share right out of the camera, with no edits and what's awesome, is they brought back pro video mode? I love this, and it works with 8k video, and we finally get 24 frames per second on 4k video. This is what you're seeing right now. All of this a-roll is being shot with the Galaxy Note 20 ultra 5g in pro mode, so you can get an idea of what the quality is like here are some shots side by side with the note 10 plus and the galaxy s20 ultra during the day.

It's a little hard to judge quality, because all flagship phones are so good during the day and even though there are some changes that are minor, I am seeing an improvement on dynamic range and overall picture quality. So a lot of people ask for these side-by-sides I'll be doing a full comparison soon. But here are a few samples, so you can get an idea. I am noticing a lot more shadow detail, especially compared to the iPhone 11 Pro max. I did a full, extensive camera comparison on these two, and I will leave a link to that.

So you can check it out. I feel like this is one of the most versatile camera systems out there right now, and I love the fact that they reduce the zoom capability to 50x instead of the 100x on the s20 ultra, the image is way more usable. The 4k video is absolutely incredible and having that 5x zoom in video and photo really does make a huge difference, it gives you a versatility similar to a mirrorless camera with nice depth of field. The 8k video is also great. It has a different look to it, but I really like it.

It still needs some tweaking, but it's amazing that you can shoot 8k video from a smartphone. You can also take 108 megapixel photos which really does give you that extra detail when you need it, especially in landscape photography, so I can 100 recommend this camera. I think it's one of the best out right now, but the one thing that I do want to see improved is noise. In low light video you can see the higher noise on the video, especially when you start to look closer. You can improve this by reducing the exposure, but that does crush the shadow detail.

I'm sure this also can be fixed in a software update in photos. It's a mixed bag, because in some scenarios I can say they have improved on the nighttime photography, but it does have the same tendencies as the s20 ultra, where you do get more noise than you would want in that nighttime shot. A lot of this is due to that larger sensor, letting a lot of light in, but the noise reduction is not optimized. Noise reduction is hard because that can degrade the quality of the nighttime photos, but I found that the nighttime shots are softer than I would like on auto mode, but the thing is that the night mode is fantastic. On the Galaxy Note, 20 ultra it really lights up.

The scene nicely, improves sharpness and reduces noise, so night mode is a major win, and what I love is that the night mode is also available on the wide angle camera which I think is improved this year. It's amazing to be able to get these types of shots at night with the wide angle. So, while the camera system can use a few updates to improve the overall stability, I think this is the best that Samsung has come out right of the gate right out of the box at launch. So that is a huge thing for Samsung. If history repeats itself, then Samsung will release a few large camera patches in the next couple of months to drastically improve the camera quality.

So once that happens, I will definitely revisit this camera review so make sure you subscribe to the channel and make sure you hit that notification bell, because you don't want to miss it. I will definitely revisit this camera after some big software updates. So in the two weeks that I've used this phone, I can safely say the clich? thing, and this is the best note ever made and if you're a fan of the note, then this is the phone to get. This is a no-brainer upgrade from the note 9, and it even may be worth it for you to upgrade from the note 10 plus, because you're getting the best of the s20 ultra and that beloved new s pen. It's a perfect marriage in your pocket.

If you're happy with your current phone, then stick with that, but I do think the Galaxy Note 20 ultra is worth looking into if you can afford the higher price tag. Thank you for watching. Let me know what you think about the Samsung Galaxy note 20 ultra 5g in the comment section below and if you picked one up, let me know about your experience. There will be a lot more content on this phone on the channel, so make sure you stay tuned. I will see you in the next one.

Source : Danny Winget