10 Things to Know About the Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra Camera By StateofTech

Hey, it's Jared with state of tech. Today we're going to talk about the Galaxy S 20 ultra camera system, that is on their new smartphone from Samsung that was announced earlier this week. There's a lot of exciting things here, a lot of big numbers and a lot of bold claims, and so I want to dive. Deep into this I mean you guys have to see my notes: I've been working and reading and researching, and even remembering some kind of topics and stuff that I've looked at when researching cameras, because I am a professional photographer, I've been shooting professionally since 2005, and I've shot weddings and events, corporate stuff, commercial, stuff, NASCAR I've, shot a lot of stuff over the years, and so I have a lot of experience in cameras and what works and what works best for me and what I, typically shoot and smartphones have increasingly become a bigger part of that, because the cameras have gotten pretty, pretty darn good. So this talk here essentially is gonna, be a little longer because I'm going to teach you a lot of stuff about these cameras, and you're really going to have a great understanding of whether the ultra is gonna, be the best option for you, because, even though it has the biggest numbers, it may not necessarily be the best camera depending on what it is that you are gonna, find most useful in a smartphone camera and that's why I'm breaking it down like this I haven't done something like this for a smartphone camera before, because it just hasn't really made sense. I do stuff like this.

Quite often over on my other YouTube channel, ditch auto, where I talk about photography, primarily and cameras and gear and stuff like that, but on smartphones were there making claims that compare them to DSLR and mirrorless style cameras, and so I want to do. I wanted to talk about this. So if this video is too long for you or you're thinking, I can't watch a video. This long check out the state of tech Coast. This episode right here is also going to be available in a podcast.

The only thing that you're going to miss is some screenshots and some images and some examples that back up what it is that I am talking about. So, let's jump into it. This camera is more of a calculator than it really is a camera, and that's really coming true in smartphones. You know with the Google Pixel phones and what iPhone is doing and, of course, with a lot of the other phones. Computational photography has taken the front seat here, and it is driving what these cameras are doing.

Obviously, with our smartphones, we can't just pack on bigger sensors and bigger lenses, because they're a smartphone, it needs to be small, and it needs to go in our pocket. So they take advantage of utilizing a software technology which is computational photography to get the most out of those little sensors that are in our smartphones, and you know, I talked about in my video that I released yesterday on the galaxy s.20 phones that I'm actually a little excited that the S 20 ultra is gonna. Be a little thicker of a phone, because there's going to be a little more to hold on to and I, don't necessarily need my phone to be razor-thin. So with that said, we are moving into a period where the cameras are more like calculators. They are very much doing a lot more software work than they are with the sensor and the optics and whatnot.

Of course, those are improving here and there, but it's really the software technology and the way that they're utilizing the hardware with the software more so than it is just trying to make the hardware the best possible that it can be. So let's talk about these 10 things, the first thing and I went in an order here. That I think is important. I've been doing my homework, I've been thinking about everything here, and I wanted to make sure that I am informing all of you with as much information as I can so that you can decide, should I buy this $1,400 or more phone, because that's really expensive, so number one. Is that there's no dual pixel autofocus on any of these cameras? Now Samsung has been using dual pixel autofocus on their main wide-angle camera, since the s7 and the s7 was really when their phones started to actually get decent with the cameras prior to the s7.

The Samsung smartphone cameras were just not that good. The iPhone beat them hands-down all the time, and even though Samsung was one of the better as far as Android phones go it just wasn't that great. So dual pixel autofocus really changed the game because the ability for the camera to focus on whatever it is you're taking pictures of and do that quickly means that you're going to get a nice sharp photo, and you're not going to miss an opportunity to get a shot. We use our smartphones to take pictures of fast-moving things like our kids running around. You know different things that are going on.

We might take it to a friend's game or something we're taking pictures. We want to we're pulling it out of our pocket, we're taking fast photos and putting it back. It's not something that we are in control of our environment. Typically, so we need a camera that is going to autofocus as good as possible, and none of the cameras on this phone have dual pixel. They all have face, detect autofocus, and we're going to talk a little more about why that is technically.

These large megapixel claims are, are utilizing, pixel bidding technology, and we'll talk a little about that, but the pixel bidding technology makes it pretty much impossible to utilize dual pixel autofocus, and so we're taking a step backwards. As far as autofocus goes I've compared the dual pixel wide and the face detect autofocus telephoto on both my note, 10 plus and the S 10, plus, because the ultra or the wide-angle camera on both of those phones is dual pixel. But then the telephoto is not, and if you compare how fast the autofocus is between the telephoto and the wide-angle on both your note, 10 and your well have got an iPhone 2, but the s 10 plus. Then you can tell a huge difference in the autofocus speed. Dual pixel is way faster and also way better at tracking, and so it's kind of a bummer that we're losing that, so I'm, hoping that it's not as bad as what we've seen, even as recent as last year's models phones.

So this I hate to start out with a bummer, but the lack of dual pixel autofocus is something that is going to come up throughout the rest of this video. So I wanted to mention it. It's likely not going to be as accurate as well, which is kind of a bummer. When canon came out with dual pixel for their DSLR cameras, it was a game-changer, their ability to track subjects and maintain a lock on those subjects as they move around and whatnot was just game-changing in the industry, and Canon still is putting out there dual pixel, even in their $16,000 c500 mark ii or mark 3. I can't remember what version it is.

Cinema camera has dual pixel autofocus in it. Now. The technology is that good they're, using it in their high high-end cameras, that we see filming movies and whatnot, so the lack of dual pixel is kind of concerning, but I'm, hoping that the pixel binning and the utilization of phase detect autofocus helps out somewhere there. I know this is a super technical, video already, and I apologize I'm trying to make this as understandable and relatable as possible, but, like I, said spending a ton of money on a phone. Is it going to be worth it? That's? Why we're doing this? So? The second thing is that they are utilizing pixel, binning technology on these sensors, so the hundred and eight megapixel and the 48 megapixel and the 40 megapixel on the front.

Those are all utilizing, pixel binning technology, which means they're taking that yeah. When you take a picture, 108 megapixels you're not actually getting a 108 megapixel photo, which would be a huge file size and would take up a ton of storage. I myself was a little confused initially on that you know, maybe you would be able to take a hundred and eight megapixel image or utilize. The pixel binning to get a really nice, you know maybe 12 megapixel image or something, and so that there's still some details that we don't know for sure until we have a phone in our hands. But what I do know for sure is that it's likely when you're, using just the standard features of the camera, you're 108 megapixel image is not going to be a hundred and eight megapixels.

What they're doing is taking nine of those, and we'll talk a little more about this 9 of those pixels and combining them into one bigger pixel, because that is the way that they have to do it. Honest tiny sensor like that, you can't produce 108 megapixels like awesome sensor. That's gonna, produce fantastic images in that size and and and have everything just work. Well, cameras get bigger cameras need more heat, dissipation and a lot of other things like that when you actually are trying to produce an image of that size, so they're utilizing pixel bending technology, which typically helps produce better low-light sensitivity. There are a lot of cameras that utilize pixel binning technology, so that you can get more light in on that sensor and have a better low-light experience when taking pictures and darker situations.

So it may not necessarily relate to higher resolution images or better detail because a lot of times there are some sacrifices there, but in low-light situations we should see some huge advancements because of the pixel binning technology, so that'll be interesting. Essentially, what it's doing is its increasing the signal-to-noise ratio, which is good, because there's only so much that a tiny, tiny, tiny pixel can do and when you group them all together, it's allowing or when you group a multitude of them together, then what it's allowing it to do is utilize that computational, photography and see what each of those pixels are doing and actually make better decisions on how to differentiate an actual image from noise, that's being captured and there's just a lot that goes into that, but that's the gist of it. So, let's start talking about the actual cameras. The front-facing camera has an 80 degree field of view, which is the same as say: the s 10 plus from last year. It has faced detect autofocus, which is a bummer, because on the other s 20s it has dual pixel.

So on the s 20 and s 20, plus we have dual pixel on the front facing on the front facing on the ultra. We lose that and that's kind of a bummer so face detect. We also have an F 2.2 aperture versus an F 1.9 that was available on the s 10 plus last year, so we're getting a little smaller of an aperture, which means less light. Coming in, of course, there's pixel binning happening because it's a 40 megapixel sensor bend down to 10 megapixels, so we're actually only going to get a 10 megapixel image out of the front-facing camera, but it's utilizing pixel binning, so hopefully that f 2.2 won't be as bad, because the pixel binning will help with the low-light situation. So essentially, what that means is that 0.7 micron size pixel is becoming 1.4 microns because of the pixel binning and the S 10 had a 1.2, 2 micra. It didn't utilize, pixel binning, so we're getting a little larger overall of a pixel but utilizing pixel binning.

So it's not much larger, but we'll see what that actually turns out to. As far as low-light performance and clarity, a lot of times we're taking selfies and lower light situations, they don't end up looking good, so we'll see how this ends up working out, so the 12 megapixel ultra-wide on the back of the phone has no autofocus at all. That is pretty typical. Most ultra whites on these phones don't have any autofocus. Its focus is set to infinity because typically items are a little further away, and so the autofocus range would go to infinity before it would even reach your subject anyways, so they just set it fixed at infinity.

It has a 120 degree field of view, which is a little less than the s 10 Plus last year, which is 123 degrees, the larger pixel size of 1.4 microns versus 1.0 on the s 10. There's no pixel binning taking place on this sensor because it's a 12 megapixel, that's it, and so there's no pixel binning. So we do get a larger actual pixel, which should produce much better quality image on the ultra-wide and since there's no binning going on there, we're gonna we're gonna, get better overall clarity. Better all resolution I mean everything's gonna, look better out of that camera than last year. The only thing that is the same effectively is the F 2.2 aperture on that particular camera. So, let's move to the star of the show.

I guess you could say, which is the main wide-angle camera, which is not really a hundred and eight megapixels like I, was mentioning before it's combining nine of those pixels into one and that will land at eight 12 megapixel photo. So people have been talking about the fact that it seems like the actual size of the photo that you're getting was larger in phones last year and on some of these cameras. That is true. Some cameras. We saw 16 megapixel images last year and now, even though it says it's a hundred, eight megapixels we're actually only going to get a 12 megapixel image.

Some people are frustrated by that personally, I, don't think I need any larger than a 12 megapixel image out of my phone I would sacrifice image size for clarity and low-light performance any day. That's why the Sony a7s camera was a game-changer in the world of mirrorless, because it was only like a 10 point, two megapixel camera, but that thing could like to see in the dark, and it changed the game, and it's why everybody is using and shooting on Sony cameras, I'm looking into a Sony a7 3 right now, and that that was just great I would rather sacrifice some image size for image, clarity and also low-light performance. So not a big deal. It is a larger sensor that is on this camera too. So a larger sensor means that there's going to be some improvements to depth of field and stuff like that as well.

That's the difference between shooting on a full-frame camera or a crop sensor camera, so I'm. Talking about like DSLR and mirrorless cameras, you can get the crop sensor, cameras which have the smaller sensor and the can get some amazing images out of them, but professionals typically shoot with a full-frame camera, because when you put 35 millimeter equivalent lenses on the full-frame camera, you get that shallow depth of field with the beautiful bouquet. In the background the blurry fall off and if there are shapes they're like super cool, like blurry orbs in the background and stuff I'm trying to explain bouquet to you, but I know you've seen it in images, and it is very pleasing to the eye, and so not that this phone is gonna, be able to achieve that. But it's going to do a little better because of that bigger sensor, utilizing the lenses that are there. It also has optical image stabilization, nothing new.

All the cameras of the past for several years on these phones have had. Oh, is but of course, it also only has phased detect autofocus no dual pixel, dual pixel autofocus has been present on the main camera for most of our previous years. Smartphones. All the way to the s7 with the Samsung, Galaxy phones and the lacking of dual pixel means that this camera may not autofocus as fast and be as good at doing things as previous year's model, which I hope is not true. This looking at the technologies and what the technologies have done for different cameras over the years, the technologies, and it would say that we're not going to have as good of autofocus performance out of this camera, but with computational, photography and all the stuff that Samsung is doing.

Who knows that may change and what we're just going to have to test it out, and I will be testing it out so make sure to subscribe to the channel or the podcast here, so I can bring that information to you when I have this s20 ultra in my hands, because of that pixel being a point, 0.8 micron pixel becomes a 2.4 micron pixel, which is massive in comparison to pretty much. All the other smartphones out on the market, so with that pixel bidding technology producing a 2.4 micron sized pixel, we should get perfect low-light performance out of this camera we should get, even though the pixel binning is, is there because of that larger size? We should get some good clarity and some things happening out of this camera because of that technology, the 108 megapixel, essentially is just a big number to make it sound, exciting, we're, probably not even gonna, be able to take a hundred and eight megapixel size image because of the binning. But with that said, that's fine I would rather utilize this pixel binning and see what that has for us. The lens on this camera is an F 1.8 aperture, which is pretty good last year on the s10, plus they utilized a dual aperture camera that shifted between I think it was like 2.4 and 1.5, and I're not utilizing that this year they just went with a single aperture, fixed aperture, again I. Don't think that the dual aperture thing really worked out too well, it was really neat, and it definitely made me get the S 10 plus last year, but I never use it and I.

Don't think really anybody else uses it either. So, let's talk about the telephoto camera on the s20 ultra. It is 48 megapixels, but utilizing pixel, bending technology we're getting an effective 12 megapixel image out of that, usually the telephoto. It has like a 16 megapixel, so we're getting a smaller image, and that is what it is. Furthermore, it's a 12 megapixel image, there's no mention on Samsung's website of any autofocus, which is really weird last year and for all the previous year phones they mention autofocus and whatnot on the website.

Right now they aren't mentioning any autofocus on this lens. There are other websites mentioning that it has face, detect autofocus and that it also has optical image stabilization. But Samsung's own website doesn't confirm this. Yet so it'll be interesting to see what exactly the phone does come with, because why would Samsung decide to omit that information? I really don't know, especially when they list it for every other phone that they have on their website, so no mention of autofocus or optical image stabilization, but you will talk a little more about stabilization later here, 24 degree fields of view, which is much tighter than most other phones, telephoto lenses, which are usually 45 degrees, so, rather than it being more of like a telephoto with a little of width, it's actually narrowing it down, and that probably means we're actually getting more of an effective zoom or focal length out of the camera, which will be interesting. They're, definitely going to have to do something there, because they're promising 10 X and a hundred X zoom out of that camera.

So that's crazy, and we'll talk a little more about that here. In a second, the F 3.5 was kind of a bummer there's an F 3.5 aperture, and these are fixed apertures, so they can't adjust an F 3.5 aperture on the telephoto, which means less light getting into that sensor, which is a bummer of course. It's utilizing pixel binning, so hopefully it makes up for it, but the F 3.5 is just not nearly as good as pretty much all the other flagship phones right now and what their telephoto lens comes with. So they made that decision we'll see they probably had to do it because of the technology in the way that they're the telephoto lens is set up in the camera. It's definitely different and weird Oh, weird in a good way, I think, but because of that they probably had to go with the smaller aperture, which we'll see what that looks like and how that affects things overall.

So, let's start talking about some other things like space zoom with the hybrid optical 10x zoom is the first mode of zoom offered here, and it will be the better mode of zoom because it is a hybrid optical zoom, which means it uses a little of lens technology for zoom, which is good. We like optical zoom, but it's a hybrid system. So it's also using computational photography to do some digital zoom there as well. So it's doing a bit of both and what that usually means is that it starts out being really clear and, as you zoom in further the image starts to fall apart a little because you hit the limitations of the optical, and now it's relying on the digital zoom. The hybrid optical zoom should be pretty good, but it's definitely gonna fall apart as you zoom in further and further so the space zooms super resolution.100X, is definitely all digital, and we're going to see lower quality resolution there in our overall image. Definitely even in the keynote.

We saw an example of two YouTubers zooming way in a hundred X to actually see the building that the keynote was taking place in and that image was really horrible. It was very low resolution. It was very pixelated because the digital zoom was doing most of the work. There was pretty much doing all the work and digital zoom basically is just doing math and trying to figure out the best way to get an image and the image falls apart. Because of that, as you get in closer there's, less and less pixel data to work with, and so pixels become larger and larger and larger until things start to look like Minecraft.

So that's basically the way that that's going to work I. Definitely like the fact that it's there, because if you need to see something far away, it's definitely going to give you that ability, but the image quality that you're going to get is not going to be that great and I hope that there isn't too much trade-off in the actual technology in these cameras and lenses. For that hundred X I would rather have less zoom and have better technology on getting him. Is that our more realistic? But we'll see these are all things I'm going to test and report back to all of you, so autofocus tracking is definitely something that is big. Autofocus, tracking helps maintain accuracy when taking pictures and keeping a subject in focus.

When you take multiple pictures, it also helps a lot in video when making sure that the autofocus stays on your subject as you're taking video and so AF tracking is super important. But AF tracking saw some huge growth and just improvements when dual pixel technology came into play. Of course, face detect. Autofocus is usually not as good and everything talked about any camera of the past, including smartphones talks about the fact that the dual pixel helps out with the AF tracking. So it is likely that the AF tracking is not going to be as good on this phone as even the other s20 models, and maybe even not as good as previous year model smartphones, because it's all face detect autofocus.

So it'll be fascinating to see here, because dual pixel gives you many more diodes for focusing face. Detect autofocus is just a sprinkling of pixels around the sensor that handle autofocus, and so there is a significantly less amount of usable pixels for autofocus here and keep in mind all the pixel binning technology and everything. That's going to affect things significantly as well, because they're binning pixels together, and you can't bin autofocus pixels together, you can only do that for photo pixels, and so the autofocus pixels are gonna, be significantly less because it is not dual pixel at his face detect and so the AF tracking is likely to suffer, and we've seen that in a lot of other cameras. Mirrorless cameras are not good at this when they first started coming out, because the dual pixel type of functionality wasn't there, or at least the hybrid utilization of both the contrast and phase detectives or not really that good, and so we just didn't see good performance at the very early stages of mirrorless cameras and, of course, now they're really great and the utilization of both of those types of focusing methods and the technology and the camera leaps and bounds growth there. But dual-pixel is still a better overall technology for utilizing that, because you have more effective pixels that can do the work and being that we don't have that.

With this particular type of sensor, it's going to be interesting to see how that AF tracking works. So it's likely not going to be as good, but I will test it and I will report back and give you guys some examples. So the last thing we're gonna talk about is 8k video, of course, 8k video is interesting, I mean it's like 4k. Video is still more than enough for most situations, but why not shoot 8k? Because you can,, I guess 8k, though, is it's not just double 4k people think oh well, 8k is like double the size, but it's not really.4K is essentially an 8 megapixel image and 8k is a 32 megapixel image, so think about the storage that that's going to take up on your phone. If you decide I'm going to shoot everything in 8k.

First, you're only getting 24 frames per second, which will be good for some situations, but if you're moving your phone around a lot and trying to capture action or anything else, that's going on it's just not gonna, look good, it's gonna, look a little blurry and also that image is gonna, be huge. It's only gonna probably store internally on your device, because it won't be able to write to an SD card that fast, so you're gonna need to get a bigger storage model phone in order to utilize 8k without running out of space. Eventually so I don't know.8K is something that I will probably test and play with once or twice and in a few situations where things are not really moving, and I want some high resolution. Video I may use it, but in most cases I'll be shooting in 4k 60 like normal and in even some cases I will be shooting in 4k 30, just because I know that there are features of the camera like AF, tracking and stuff, like that. That you're not gonna, get a 8k mode, and you usually don't even get those things in 4k, 60 frames per second mode.

It's best still to shoot at 4k, 30 or lower resolution, because you get all the functionality of your phone's camera with those frame rates and that resolution you're not going to get those at the higher resolution. I will make sure to test to that and bring all that back to you, and that is gonna. Do it for this video. So if you've been watching the video awesome subscribe to the YouTube channel, because I will get my hands on one of these phones, and we will test it a lot and talk about it here and of course, if you're listening to the podcast, you may want to jump over to the YouTube channel as well, because in the future there will be a lot more visual reasons to watch when it comes to talking about the s20 and the cameras. But, like I said, the podcast is great for longer form talks like this because you can listen.

There isn't a lot to show here other than some screenshots and stuff like that. So the podcast is a great supplement, so definitely subscribe if you haven't, yet the link is down in the description below, so I also have a link down in the description below for the page on Amazon for the s20. Of course, if you want to reserve a pre-order, you can, I think do that now. So you'll want to check out the links down in the description below, but do keep in mind that I will be back here showcasing what all of this means in the real world and what it looks like and bring my thoughts and opinions to you as well. So thanks much for being here.

Click that like button, if this video was helpful, share it with a friend who's, been talking about s20 stuff with you and I hope to see you back here in the next one. Take care.

Source : StateofTech