Galaxy S20 Ultra vs S20+ In-Depth Comparison & Review | Which Phone Is Actually Best? By InsideTech

The latest flagship smartphones from Samsung are finally here, boasting impressive, new specs and plenty of upgrades. From last year, the Galaxy S 20 ultra is making headlines with its huge display and a revolutionary camera setup, but also as one of the most expensive smartphones' money can buy. This is the phone with insane specs on paper, and the only thing that's perhaps more eye-catching is the crazy $1,400 starting price. Samsung have basically taken every speck from There s, ten models and turn the dial up to 11, or in this case 20 and considering this spec sheet, it's easy to get excited about the new S 20 lineup. The launch of the new phones hasn't exactly been flawless, though, with early reports of major camera performance issues, although you'd expect Samsung's highest end flagship to be their best phone. These issues have given us reason to consider the cheaper than 20 plus as a potentially better overall device.

The S, 20 plus, is missing a couple of defining features of the ultra, but, as we'll see in this video, it might actually benefit from this in more ways than just saving money and also be making reference to the smaller s 20, which, for the most part, is just a smaller s.20 plus, but its compact form factor and cheaper starting price makes it a compelling alternative in a sea of increasingly large smartphones in this review, we'll be comparing all the differences in specs and features to see not only which of these phones offers the best value for money, but also answering the question of which of these phones is actually best. Let's take a look, the designs are mostly familiar. We still have glass front and rear panels, aluminum frames and an IP 68 water resistance. These are the cosmic black versions, but I did notice that the color options are much more restricted this year, it's only a choice of black or gray for the s20 ultra and I found myself missing the more vibrant color options of previous years, like the gorgeous or a glow Note 10. In an ideal world.

I would trade the galaxy's glossy glass for the smooth, matte textures found on the iPhone 11 or the pixel 4, but I don't have many complaints here, the top of the phone's house, the hybrid SIM card trays, allowing you to expand the phone storage by up to a terabyte. All the s20 is come with 128 gigs of OF s3 storage, but the ultra also offers a 512 gigabyte version in cosmic gray, although this will depend on your region. The bottom features the familiar speaker, grille and USB see charging port, but the more notable change here is the removal of the headphone jack. Now I'll admit that I almost never need to use this myself. There are now so many great wireless options out there for headphones.

That I personally, don't really miss it, but I absolutely stand by anyone. Who's disappointed that the headphone jack is now gone this year. The power and volume buttons are all on the right-hand side and the big speak button is now integrated into the power button. Fortunately, these are placed in a much more reachable position this year, despite the increase in the phone sizes. Make no mistake: these are big phones significantly bigger than the regular s 20, and the ultra feels especially large and heavy in the hand.

There's no doubt they're having a huge display in your hands is pretty awesome, but I empathize with those who believe that phones are now too big. It's pretty much impossible to use either of these phones one-handed, even with reachability software, and there are plenty of jeans pockets that simply won't fit the phone in. So that's something to consider the phones feature redesigned camera bumps for the new quad camera setups. At this point, we're no strangers to bigger camera modules, but the design will certainly be polarizing and the s20 ultra especially takes camera bumps to the extreme. It doesn't just occupy a huge area on the back of the phone, but is also much thicker than on the other s.

Twenties I'm, not sure any smartphones Rock on a table as much as this one most of us will be using a phone case that will negate any issues, but it's worth pointing out getting back to the front display. The design at first glance may seem fairly familiar. Samsung have settled on a central placement for the camera lens, which I must admit, is growing on me, and the lens is also shrunk in size. From the note 10, this means the dual lens selfie camera of the s10 plus is gone too, but, as we saw in previous videos, what you gain in-depth information from the secondary lens doesn't really justify how much you sacrifice in screen space, so good decision Samsung the bezels, remain pretty thin all round and Samsung I've still managed to squeeze in a front speaker grille to the top bezel. The speakers sound surprisingly clear and loud, given their size.

Although those coming from last year's as 10 models may notice a slight downgrade. The phone's use the ultrasonic fingerprint scanner from last year, which, as we know, onto the fastest unlock methods on the market, but they're placed in a good position on the screen, where my thumb naturally rests, and I generally didn't have any problems worthy of complaint. One of my favorite changes is that the screens are much flatter than in previous years. A change I personally wanted from last year's phones. The slight curve still creates the near bezel asides.

We don't see in flat screen phones, but the curve isn't so over-the-top, but it suffers from the accidental screen. Presses we've seen in previous years from my testing. So far, I haven't had any problems with this at all. So this for me, has been a welcome improvement, but let's talk more about that display, specifically because this is an area where Samsung can really flex this year. The Galaxy series phones, notoriously have really great-looking displays.

They're, sharp and bright have great colors and an HDR temper certified, but this year sees the introduction of the final piece of the puzzle. A high refresh rate, the 120s refresh rate could well be the best new feature this year and massively improves the user experience. The response rate has been improved to 240 milliseconds to match the high refresh rate, and the resulting experience is super. Smooth scrolling and snappy touch inputs with the 120 Hertz mode turned on. The display will always show a high refresh rate, so we don't have any of that dropping down to 60 in certain situations.

Nonsense. We saw from Google the fast response. Time and refresh rate may be particularly interesting to those into gaming, where this kind of performance was previously limited to dedicate Gaming phones and, of course, the s20 said the processing power to keep up with the most demanding of games. ?, it's difficult to show you exactly how good this looks and feels on camera. But when you use the sim real-life you'll see just how much nicer the phone is to use with a hundred and twenty Hertz turned on.

You will need to manually turn this on ? since, for some reason, the phone ship with the screen set to 1080p 60. Sadly, if you want to use the high refresh rate, then you have to lower the screen resolution from the maximum 1440p setting, which is disappointing. You have these crazy, expensive smartphones with potentially insane displays that Samsung are limiting with software, presumably to save on battery okay, Samsung kind of have a point here, because using the high refresh rate does take a significant toll on battery life, but this decision really should be left with the consumer. If my $1,400 smartphone can show 1440p resolution and refresh at 120 Hertz that I wanted to do so, we know from other phones that this is a possibility and not a limitation of the hardware. So I really hope.

Samsung will offer this feature in a future. Update opposed, find x2 Pro does offer 1440p at 120 Hertz and because of this, takes the crown away from an otherwise deserving victor for Best smartphone display the difference in 60, vs 120 Hertz still hugely outweighs the drop you'll see in screen resolution. So for me this was the best setting for the phones. Despite the drop in battery life, we've seen before how having an inadequate battery life can ruin the experience of a high refresh rate display. Yes, pixel 4 I'm, looking at you, but what Samsung have done that Google didn't with their high refresh rate phones, is included a battery big enough to support them even with 120 Hertz turned on the phone still got me through a full day of use without needing to be overly conservative or make too many compromises.

My screen on time averaged around 5 hours with moderate use and was particularly good with the larger s 20 Ultra I found I could extend this noticeably by dropping the resolution and the refresh rate ?, which is always an option, and perhaps one the post with the regular s 20 may want to consider. Both phones can be fast charge from not to fall in just over an hour with the included 25 watt charges. The ultra can also be charged at 45 watts, but Samsung wants you to pay extra for that. Privilege I noticed that, even with the included charges, the old charged even faster than the s20 plus, with its larger 5,000 William hour battery, that's pretty impressive. Just as we saw with last year's models, we have both fast wireless charging and also wireless power share, which lets you charge up other devices by placing them on the back of the phones.

Overall, the battery and charging capabilities were really impressive and easily. What are the phone's greatest strengths with displays? And batteries aside, it's so far, so good from the spec sheet, but now it's time for the part that most of you are really here for the cameras and these ultimately produced mixed results. The cameras have been completely overhauled from last year, with both phones offering a quad camera setup, but the specs and resulting performance is quite different between the plus and ultra models, starting out with the good pictures, a characteristically bright and contrast II, but not quite as over saturated as we've seen in previous years, they're also sharper than ever before, on a Samsung device and when the camera gets it just right. Images, look fantastic and start to rival, even the best on the market, I generally found that the Ultra had more muted or natural-looking colors, whilst the plus had more vibrant but less realistic, colors. The plus also typically produced sharper images than the Ultra, but this was often caused by focus issues which I'll come on to in a second.

The ultra-wide lens is still the weakest of the three main cameras, but even this producing decent looking photos, although low-light ultra-wide shots do suffer more from noise. The combination of the wide telephoto and ultra-wide lenses give the S 20s averse Still t that's lacking in market leaders like the pixel 4, and when it comes to photography, you have more options with these lenses this year than we've seen before in a Samsung phone, but with most of the examples so far. This was really the best case scenario, and I'm sad to confirm that the reported focus issues are here in abundance, often forcing me to retake photos multiple times. It's an even bigger problem for video and the s20 ultra definitely suffers the most, but both cameras would often be left hunting for focus, especially with close-up subjects. The ultra sacrifices the dual pixel autofocus found on the s20 plus and older phones, which proved crucial for fast focusing, but it could be the ultras huge main sensor.

That's amplifying these issues, it's a shame, because 4k video this year would otherwise be the best. Yet it's much smoother and the stabilization has greatly improved, but the focus hunting issue was often pretty severe and spoiled what would otherwise be great photo and video. The ultra really struggled with focusing on low-light, even after using tap to focus, sometimes even after I finally got my subject in focus. The clumsy autofocus would step in and mess everything up again, which was super annoying. It's a shame because, when I finally managed to get the shot in focus, the camera did a great job of exposing the image in very tough lighting conditions.

Using these phones in the real world, the camera becomes very unreliable, since you can never trust the phone's to nail the focus where, with phones like the iPhone, 11 or pixel 4, you can be confident to pull them out of your pocket and quickly. Snap off a good photo. Samsung have said they're, aware of the issues and have promised to fix, but flagship phones is expensive, as these really shouldn't be shipping with such awful bugs, and we've got no time frame as to when or if these issues will be fixed, but fingers crossed for the future, and I'll. Let you know if any updates improve the cameras later down the line with the focus issues aside, I had a much better experience, photographing landscapes and buildings, and the low-light performance of these phones is perfect. The main sensors are twice as large in the s20 plus as the s10 and almost three times as large, with the ultra.

So night mode is much better. As a result, I expected the s20 ultra to be superior, but there really wasn't much to separate the two phones at all. There are times when the regular photo mode is actually better. A night mode can sometimes over process and make the images seem a little cartoonish. The pixel affords night sight is widely regarded as being the best night mode, and this image is more realistic and true to life, but the s 20s are catching up with the best Samsung's bright night notice, multiple photos into one shot to reduce blur and noise, and they've done a perfect job.

With this there's no longer a substantial gap to market leaders like the pixel 4 and the iPhone 11 and Samsung owners can finally boast having fantastic nighttime performance on their phones. But let's talk about the phone's, headline-grabbing features the hybrid optical, zoom and, of course, the 100 times space zoom. Both phones now have higher resolution. Telephoto lenses and the zoom capability really seems to have been the focus for Samsung this year. The s20 ultra is clearly the heavyweight with his periscope lens and 100 times even feature and I, for one, certainly had high hopes, since Samsung were confident enough to stamp this on the back of the phone as we move through the levels of zoom, starting out with the ultra-wide lenses, there's not much initially to separate the phones, although it did notice that the colors are much more consistent with the three lenses on the s20 ultra.

As you move through four times, though, the ultra starts to pull ahead with its superior zoom and at eight times some. You can really see the quality degrading with the s20 plus the point of Samsung's space. Zoom technology is to offer better than usual zoom performance, but comparing the s20 plus with the iPhone 11 Pro. It didn't really see a huge benefit. Sure the bricks and the wooden paneling seemed more prominent on the right, but this is more to do with Samsung's higher contrast than higher resolution against another market leader, the Google Pixel for I'd, say the pixel actually perform better.

Of course, the pixel zoom is maxed out here, so maybe the s20 plus is real benefit lies in its ability to zoom up to 30 times, but beyond eight times pushing the phone to its limits. It would be tough to get any usable photos anyway. Of course, if you compare this to the s20 ultra, then it's a different story and highlights the ultras advantage. The ultra destroys the iPhone 11 Pro here too, but I guess I just expected the s20 blast to be better but pushing the s 20s. Further, though the Plus model is starting to struggle.

The ultra still produces very crisp images, a 10 times zoom and even at 30 times. I still think you could get some more than usable photos from it. The s 20 plus tops out here, but when pushing the ultra 2 it's hyped 100 times, zoom I was pretty disappointed. It's not so much that I expected a smartphone to be better at a hundred times, ooh the fact that it even can zoom this far is amazing. It's just that it falls far short of the marketing hype surrounding the phone this 100 times.

Zoom is supposed to be part of the reason you buy. This phone I mean Samsung printed this on the back of the phone, but I'd be perfectly happy just cropping on my 30 times pictures for my s, 20, plus, to achieve an equally useless result. Not only do I think that this feature will rarely be useful, but literally taking the shot without a tripod is an ordeal in itself. Samsung have been forward-thinking enough to include a mini viewfinder to help you to rate the camera, but this really only helps to turn impossible into quite difficult and. Without excellent lighting and a very steady hand, space zoom is practically useless.

This is a picture at a hundred times. Some of the shot you'll just have to take my word, for it doesn't get me wrong. The s20 ultra at 10 or even 30 times zoom is great. It's one of its key advantages over the s20 plus and is really what Samsung should have been promoting I think if they hadn't overhyped the 100 times, zoom I would have been feeling impressed right now, rather than underwhelmed. Another headline breaking feature is the s20 ultras 108 megapixel sensor, which actually uses pixel pinning to produce its normal 12 megapixel image.

A 108 megapixel photo can be taken on a separate mode, but it comes with a few compromises that mean it's not always better than the regular 12 megapixel image. The first thing, you'll likely notice, is that the large sensor creates a very shallow depth of field which produces a blood background effect. There's a higher contrast here too, which, for this photo I think works really well, but only when cropping in on the image. Can you really see the benefit in sharpness of the higher resolution at 400% crop? The advantage of the 108 megapixel image is clear, but since the plane of focus is so shallow in this mode, other areas in the image actually become much softer. Looking at the flooring in the door mat, the textures are lost to the softening in the high-res image, so the original 12 megapixel version may actually be the more useful picture.

Overall, the high-res mode is much slower and the file sizes are much larger. So if you asked me if I'd be upset to lose the 108 megapixel feature by buying the Plus model, instead, I'd only need to look again at the phone starting price. To answer. PS 20 plus also has a higher resolution image mode by using its 64 mega pixel telephoto lens immediately, there's a noticeable difference in color, which could be due to the fact that these are captured by different lenses again only when cropping in on the image can you really see the difference in resolution, albeit a more subtle difference than with the s20 ultra. But crucially, this high-res mode doesn't produce the same softening issues we saw with the ultra and a much larger area of the image in focus side-by-side.

The plus models technically lower res image, still has the greater detail in the doormat in the bottom right or the bricks of the house. In the background, so I'd say the altars 108 megapixel sensor doesn't go very far in justifying its higher price over the s20 plus, the numbers on the spec sheet can be confusing. The s20 plus has a higher megapixel account on its telephoto lens, but poor resume performance than the s20 ultra. The ultra has a huge 108 megapixel sensor, but it causes more focus issues compared to the plus models.12 megapixel lens. It just goes to prove the specs on paper.

Aren't everything there's a new photo mode this year called single, take where the camera will record a series of photos and videos in a single, take and apply various crops, filters and effects. It's not something I'll personally use and is a little gimmicky, but it could be a fun and easy way to let you be a little more creative. Moving on to more traditional features. The live, focus mode produced mixed results at whilst the edge detection was generally pretty good. The cameras still struggled with focus, even though the phone's auto-detected faces each time.

The final image sometimes produces relatively blurred, faces compared to other areas like the jeans, which is especially clear on the right. The s20 plus uses the telephoto lens for light focus, but the wider live focus mode is taken on the mainland's, whereas the s20 ultra simply crops on the main lens for both I generally found. The zooms live focus modes provided better results, particularly with background blur, which you can see, is quite patchy here, with the ultra. Even the regular photo mode struggled with human subjects, though especially the focus on the s20 ultra and both cameras were still desperate to smooth skin tones even with beauty mode. Disabled I was quite impressed with life focus on non-human subjects, though, and the phones nailed this tricky shot at the plant first time having good lighting is key when it comes to getting a good life focus effect.

It's just Samsung's software, then he's tweaking to iron out the issues. So, hopefully the promised upcoming software patch will help the front cameras this year are very good and produced bright and very sharp images once you disable all the annoying beauty mode features. That is, there's always nothing to separate the two phones here, aside from a slight color difference, where I think the ultra has slightly over saturated the Reds, much like the main rear camera, there's also a separate high resolution mode for the ultra, which has a 14 megapixel front sensor. The angle seems wider here, but the difference from the 10 megapixel mode is only subtle. You need to crop in on images to really notice the difference, and you clearly don't get four times the image quality with the bigger file size.

There was less grain in the background, though- and this is still the sharpest and probably the best selfie camera on a smartphone but I- don't think this is substantial enough difference from the s20 plus that plus owners should be jealous. The live focus mode disables, the 40 megapixel feature, so there's barely anything to separate the two phones here, either I did find the portrait effect, produce quite sharp edges and didn't give the most natural background blur. But it's still just as good as last year's s10 plus and achieves this with just a single lens. The upgraded was more interested in with the front cameras is that they now support 4k at 60 frames per second I forgave. The fact that there's no stabilization, but the focus tracking is awful.

You can't even tap to focus, so I had to switch to a different camera mode like photo, get into focus and then switch back before starting recording I normally had to just drop to 4k 30. To avoid these issues, which was disappointing, the depth of field is also quite shallow and a very shallow on the ultra. So overall there wasn't a huge improvement from last year. Perhaps the biggest announcement from the Samsung launch event is that all 3s Twenties can now record in 8k resolution, you'll notice the cameras really punch in when switching to a K, and you'll be limited to 5 minute recording z' at a time which alone would take up a huge 3 gigabytes of storage. But as impressive as 8k sounds on a spec sheet, the quality of the footage was usually really poor.

The focus hunting issues were at their worst when filming a 8k on both phones, ? and with any camera movement. The image was very choppy, often stuttered and suffered from rolling shutter issues. Excellent lighting is essential, but even in optimal conditions, the video was simply too unstable and filming in 4k 60 produced much better results ever single time. If we pause the video here, you can see that this frame is actually quite sharp and one of the benefits of filming a 8k is that you can pull thirty-three megapixel stills from it, which is cool, but the whole point of video is to have a moving image and sadly the quality just isn't there. Yet you may have better luck when using a gimbals, a tripod or when filming distant subjects.

But at this point, 8k is more of a tech demo than a genuinely useful feature, not to mention you'd, be hard-pressed to find a 8k display. That could actually show this footage in its true resolution anyway. So 8k might be a bit pointless right now. Low-Light video quality still isn't amazing, but has definitely been improved, particularly with stabilization. But if you were thinking about trying HK at night, you should probably just forget it.

It was a fairly even match between the two phones, since the old show often had a brighter and less grainy image, but the constant focus hunting made it less practical to use than the s20 plus I think. The focus problem will be an issue more often, so I'd probably lean towards the plus model when it comes to low-light video. Overall, some parts of the new cameras make them the best yet, but it's mainly the new headline features that are causing problems, so I really hope. Samsung can rectify this. With software updates, the issues stopped the ultra from claiming the top spot is the best smartphone camera and as surprised as I am to say this.

The s20 pluses camera is better. If you're wondering where the s20 factors into all of this, the depth sensor is the only difference between the s20 and DES 20 plus cameras and as we've seen in previous years, this doesn't add much beyond a few AR gimmicks. But moving on to the final specs on the sheet, those that relate to the performance were much more reliable. We get the snapdragon 865 or the Enos 990, and a huge 12 gigabytes of ram or 16 for the maxed out s20 ultra. The internal storage is the fast OF, s3 storage, so performance wise.

These phones are pretty much specked out to the max and from my testing, both phones offer a superfast and snappy experience. Samsung's 1uy 2.1 software on android 10 tries to take advantage of the new hardware. For example, you can now pin apps into the RAM for quick launching, which could be really useful for multitasking sum-sum, bring their own gestures for navigation. As the screen recorder from the note 10 and have made some UI improvements like adding a less distracting volume bar and incoming notifications. One UI is a pretty decent Android skin, but isn't as clean as stock Android.

There are quite a lot of Samsung duplicates, apps you'll probably want to ignore, but the software is packed with features to highlight a couple. The new music share lets your friends connect to your Bluetooth devices, so, for example, they can hook up to your car's audio system without needing to pair themselves. There's also a new airdrop like feature called quick share which lets you instantly share. Files with nearby devices and this along with music share and camera features like single take, should be coming to last year's phones too. One of the biggest new features Samsung are promoting, is 5g and all 3's 20s are able to support it, but this comes with some important caveats.

First, the regular s 20 only supports low to mid-band 5g, which offers speeds only slightly above the current 4G. On a good day. The plus and ultra models also support millimeter wave, which is the band that offers the crazy download speeds that have given 5g all the surrounding hype. But this is also the band that you need to stand a few feet away from the mass to make use of, and even the mid-band 5g coverage is still very limited. The truth about 5g is that it's just not ready yet so, though, I praised Samsung for future proofing, these devices- you really shouldn't, be buying these phones for 5g, for some people, you'll be paying for this feature and never get to use it, but this may be more useful for those who will keep the phone for four or five years.

So the final thing to discuss is the price at which of these phones. You should buy. The s20 plus starts at $1,200 and the ultra at 1400, with the regulars 20 dropping in just below the thousand dollar mark. For me, the s20 ultra is a difficult phone to recommend a $1,400 smartphone shouldn't be shipped with as many camera bugs as it has, even if Samsung do eventually release the software fix. My main concern, though, is that not all the issues at the s 20s will or even could be fixed by software alone, and that makes it a lot more difficult to openly recommend such an expensive phone.

The camera is really the only thing letting it down and the rest of the phone is fantastic. Let's not forget how great the battery life and displays are, but there's a reason that most of Samsung's marketing most of this video is dedicated to the camera, because people really care about it. For those who can stomach the price. The ultra has a clear advantage when it comes to camera zoom into the bigger display and battery life might be tempting. But given all the camera issues, the plus model emerges not only is a better value device, but I think a better phone overall I don't take many zoomed photos, so the plus would offer more than enough for me and the rest of the camera simply performed better than the ultra I guess I'm, just struggling to see where the extra $200 is justified over the s20 Plus and certainly not the $400 premium over the regular s.20 I think I'd personally be tempted by the smaller s 20, where the only potential downside would be battery life. You'd also lose out on the depth sensor and a little on screen size, but it's physically, more compact and easier to use which, aside from the price, is perhaps most tempting of all in the UK there's.

Actually a 4G only version available for the s 20, the RAM drops to 8 gigabytes, but the saving of a hundred pounds over the 5g version seems like a no-brainer for anyone. Who'll keep the phone for two years or so I kind of wish. The plus and ultra offered this too. If you have one of last year's phones, I wouldn't upgrade just yet and if you're looking for a new Samsung phone, then I highly recommend. Last year's s10 series, which are now available at perfect prices price, will be an area where competing Android smartphones can undercut the s twenties.

But if Samsung really can fix those cameras, these phones will be the ones to beat this year. If you're thinking of buying one of these phones, then let me know in the comments which one you're looking at is anyone holding out for the s20 with s-pen I mean the note 20. Also, if you already have an S 20, are you happy with it, or you disappointed with the camera? It would be interesting to know drop a like if you enjoyed this subscribes for the full comparison versus the iPhone, and thanks a lot for watching I'll, see you in the next one.

Source : InsideTech