Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra - A User Review After 70 Days! By Hardware Canucks

When you hear the term ultra. You would typically associate that with the best or extreme or loaded. In fact, the term ultra comes from Latin, and it means beyond, so what happens when you slap that term to a product, especially a smartphone? Well, according to Samsung, this will change the photography game. It'll help you create without boundaries. It should also be able to hold up with anything and everything you throw at it, whether if it's leveraging 5g putting it through extreme conditions, capturing high resolution, photos and videos without compromising on storage, blistering performance, a battery that can keep up to your demands, a display, that's revolutionary. You get the point, oh and let's not forget the ultra price tag that comes with it in this case $1,400 for people who live in the United States and for lovely Canadians $2,300 for a phone, I repeat, for a phone, you see I've been using the s20 ultra for the past 10 weeks, and I'm still having trouble figuring out who this is for now.

Don't get me wrong. I love a lot of things about the s20 ultra, but I also have some thoughts. Some mini rants, because this is the most expensive smartphone that I've ever held, and it deserves to be treated with the utmost respect and scrutiny, so sit back, grab a drink or a snack or maybe both because this was going to be a long one, and I'll leave timestamps in the description down below. If you want to get to a certain segment. So, let's get to it after this corsair dark rock RGB pro is a mouse for every type of gamer, with 50 million moron switches, lighting, bling, two side grips for better comfort, a type-c connector with 50-hour battery life and the three-way operation mode with corsair's slipstream hyper-fast wireless technology check it out below alright.

First things: first design, it's a minor upgrade over the s10 series, but it still looks pretty when you unbox it for the first time, of course, but that shine only lasts for about 5 minutes. As you can see. This is what it really looks like when you start using it extensively without a case, but you probably knew that let's also address the elephant in the room that huge, thick jacked camera bump. Listen, it might not be the prettiest thing that you've ever seen, but Samsung had no choice. This phone has four cameras.

Now, if you decide to place this flat on a table, prepare to get used to this, pretty sure you can make a rap song out of that now in a world where we're starting to see the competition coming out with unique ways to hide fingerprints and adding contoured matte finishes to the back, to make it look fresh and classy. The s20 ultra, in my opinion, looks dated perhaps give us different color options like a ceramic blue option, because the s20 plus and the s20 have those options or a different texture at the back to make it look unique compared to the competition. I really wish that they did something different here, because to me the s20 series just looks like a copy and paste from the s10 with minor tweaks here and there, and that's about it. Oh, and the other thing that I should mention is the size and the weight of this phone for comparison. It's about the same size as the OnePlus 8 pro, but it weighs more than 200 grams.

Now that might not sound like a lot, but if you're like me, using it one-handed lying down on a couch, you will definitely experience fatigue which could result in unexpected disasters that shall remain unknown seriously. I miss using smaller phones and dissing it folks. Next up, the display and Samsung pulls something completely out of the ordinary you see with previous Samsung phones, we're used to curved screens around the edges, and I've had numerous issues with palm rejection which, to an extent I was able to address through software settings. But this time they took a step back and went with a flat screen with a gentle curve. That's barely noticeable just to give the phone that bezel-less look and the result of that is that you get better grip when you're holding the phone in one hand, no accidental touches, which is awesome, and you can watch content without any distractions, from glare that you typically notice with aggressively curved displays.

This is exactly what a phone should function like, and I'm happy that Samsung learned from their mistakes, the screen spans across 6.9 inches, and it is gorgeous guys. Samsung's AMOLED technology is one of the best out there, and it offers vibing colors with deeper blacks. However, I really wished if it got brighter outdoors, like the 8 pro with its peak brightness at a thousand nits. But let's not forget it's really sharp too, since it features quad, HD plus resolution and the most notable improvement over last year's s10 is the upgraded refresh rate from 60hz to 120hz. But there is more to that story.

You see, for some unknown reason, Samsung decided to cap that buttery smooth 120 hertz experience at 1080p, and that has caused a bit of controversy over the internet, which I mean we should have all expected now. This is not a chipset limitation, because the OnePlus 8 pro, for instance, can do both quad HD and 120 hertz without a problem at the same time, and it features the same specs as the s20 ultra. So what exactly are you giving up here? Well, if you're used to watching 1440p content on YouTube or any other platform, you won't be able to do that on the s20 ultra, because you will be limited to 1080p. Now you can just go back to the settings and enable quad HD at 60 hertz, but that completely defeats the purpose of getting the smartphone in the first place. Now does screen resolution really matter for a screen this size.

It really depends on how you look at things you see our eyes have a physical limit when it comes to spotting individual pixels. I personally can't notice any difference between quaint HD and full HD on a smartphone, so it might not be a dealbreaker for some of you out there, but there is the other side. There is the other side of the spectrum where people want everything they're not willing to compromise on screen resolution for refresh rate uh, because you know they're paying close to fourteen hundred dollars. For this thing, so compromises shouldn't be a thing honestly, I don't see a point in calling this phone ultra anymore. With that being said, I have to give credit to Samsung for delivering that fast 120 hertz experience constantly because they haven't baked any dynamic modes on this phone, that switches refresh rates, depending on the type of content that you're going through on your smartphone I'll.

Give you a perfect example on my OnePlus 8 pro when I'm scrolling through YouTube or talon, which is my third party Twitter, app or some other apps. The phone actually tends to lag quite a bit, and it almost feels like I'm using a 60hz display, even though the phone is set to quad HD at 120 hertz, when I flip over to the s20 ultra, the refresh rate is constant, regardless of the app that I'm using on a regular basis. Now, at this point, you might be wondering about battery life, because when you keep adding features on top of features, the battery ends up being the victim. Ultimately uh. Now, when I switched over this phone, I was getting awful battery life.

How about you may be wondering uh plugging in during the middle of the day kind of situation, which was definitely not easy, especially in the middle of road trips. Mind you! This was before quarantine season. I was averaging three and a half to four hours of screen on time, which was not what I expected from a phone this caliber, but through the magical powers of software updates it kept getting better. That's right! I was getting I'm now getting like a day and a half to two days. If I push it really hard, which is definitely awesome, so if you're a power user, you don't have to worry about it even with the 120 hertz mode, enabled full time you're just good to go.

So Samsung made the right call by jamming in a 5 000 William battery to keep up with that fast screen. By the way my sample has the snapdragon 865 soc, and I am aware that in certain regions, where Samsung's offering Enos models, the battery life does tend to suffer quite a bit. So if you are looking for the s21 ultra just make sure you grab the one with the 865 processor, just because it's a lot more power efficient compared to the Enos variants. The ultrasonic fingerprint sensor is still present on the s20 ultra, just like the s10. They haven't made any major improvements.

Here honestly, I was really hoping to see Samsung bring something different here like a secure face, unlock system like the pixel 4, because I really, really missed face unlock on that smartphone just because it worked every time, regardless of the lighting condition. Even in pitch black, the IR tracking was spot on and uh yeah I mean if you're, if you're, you know fair smartphone manufacturer thinking of slapping the term ultra on your phones, you want to make sure that you're bringing something beyond customers- imagination, something that you know you can compete against. But um, that's not the case here now. With that being said, I haven't had any issues with the fingerprint sensor uh it's fast. I also love the fact that you can simply unlock your smartphone with the screen turned off.

So that's pretty cool glancing over the rest of the features. It's got: the ip68 dust and water resistant rating, expandable storage up to a terabyte QI. Wireless charging, though, keep in mind that it's not as fast as OnePlus proprietary, 30 watt warp charge, uh, basically they've just brought everything from the s10 to the s20 without making any tweaks the speakers sound great you're still getting that stereo imaging with the earpiece and the bottom facing speaker call. Quality has also been excellent. I haven't heard any complaints from anyone who I've been talking to on the other side and the haptic vibration motor on this phone is amazing.

It's way stronger than the OnePlus 8 pro, and I'll promise. You in fact I'll guarantee you. You will never miss a notification or phone call, because it's absolutely amazing. It's the best. Moving on to software Samsung's, one UI has matured slightly over these past few years, but it still comes with bloatware apps, like Samsung health, Samsung globe, Samsung, SmartThings, Samsung internet.

The list just goes on. They really want you to get into their ecosystem, but I ended up removing most of them now. You might not be familiar with this layout and that's because I've customized it with my favorite launcher, widgets and icon packs. In fact, if you're interested in a complete walkthrough on how I set up my android smartphone, I have made a dedicated video covering that, and you can check it out over here. Ever since I switched from the pixel 4, I've had to get used to a few things like the full screen gesture navigation Samsung.

Does it slightly differently? So, instead of a single bar that you typically find on android 10, you now have three separate bars, one for going back, one for jumping back to the home screen and one for recent apps. I was really annoyed by the back gesture because on the pixel 4 and the OnePlus 8 pro, all you had to do was swipe left to right on any app, but on the s20 you have to swipe up from the bottom left corner to make it work, I'm sure over time, you'll get used to it. In fact, if you're not a fan of full screen gestures, you can bring back the dedicated nav buttons. So that's pretty cool. Now Samsung did remove the dedicated Bixby button, which thank you so much.

I don't know why that was there in the first place on previous phones, but they've actually mapped it to the power button. So if you hold the power button, if you want to turn off your smartphone, it actually ends up activating Bixby. Now there is a workaround to this. If you hold down the volume down and power button, it'll bring up the power off options, and if you want to make life less complicated, you can head over to the side key settings and choose the power off option under the press and hold section other than that. The software experience has been great.

You still have customization options with the widgets and the lock screen. The theme store is still here, and I will warn you that most of them are paid versions and, quite frankly, useless personally Samsung's one UI is not my cup of tea. I like oxygen OS from OnePlus and the stock UI that Google offers, but you don't have to be on the same boat as I am. Finally, let's wrap things up with the camera performance. This is where you would expect the phone to shine, given its ultra badge and the triple camera setup, well, technically, quad, but I'll get to that in a bit.

So for starters, you get a 12 megapixel ultra-wide angle, sensor, 108, megapixel, standard wide angle and a 48 megapixel telephoto sensor, the aperture on all three of them are varied, and they're all optically stabilized, which is awesome. That fourth camera is a 0.3 megapixel time-of-flight dev sensor, which helps process live focus or in layman's terms, portrait mode. Let's start with the ultra-wide generally, it produces respectable results with good dynamic range, saturation and contrast, but it seriously lacks detail. Samsung tends to apply a softening filter in the shadows, and it over sharpens subjects around the highlights to make up for the detail and throughout my testing period, I've learned one thing from using this camera, if you're using it in broad daylight, expect over sharpened photos and in low light. It applies a super soft filter, and it just can't keep up with the competition like the pixel 4.

, the OnePlus 8 pros ultra-wide angle sensor does a much better job because it has a 48 megapixel sensor and there's barely any software processing taking into effect resulting in cleaner images, there's just no way to get away from Samsung's post shopping effect, which really is unfortunate. It honestly looks like a video game render on the s20 ultra, whereas on the 8 pro it's more true to life. The main 108 megapixel sensor is good, but keep in mind that by default it does pixel bin to produce 12 megapixel images. So if you want to take advantage of that full 108 megapixel sensor uh, you need to make sure you go into the settings and enable that option. Keep in mind that it doesn't remember that settings, so you will have to manually do that every single time when you open the camera, which is definitely annoying.

The first thing that stood out to me was the detail. You can punch in to retain information which is pretty cool. I've also noticed that this new sensor has toned back on saturation. In some situations, the picture turns out with too much contrast which you may or may not like, but generally it does a great job with dynamic range and sharpness Samsung still loves to apply that sharpening filter, and given that this is a huge sensor, it does a pretty good job separating the subject from the background, so you don't really have to rely on portrait mode or live focus. However, if you want to get a closer subject in focus, you're going to have some trouble there, because you'll start to notice fringing on the sides, and the both tends to be a little weird.

It's because it's razor-thin and that's because of the f one point: aperture, that's one of the biggest drawbacks of a larger sensor to be honest, low light performance here is not the greatest, as I mentioned earlier, Samsung just loves to smooth out things, speaking of which night mode for some reason ended up being a disaster on my sample, as you can see by this image compared to the OnePlus 8 pro it processes. The highlights in such an aggressive manner, there's just no hope for restoration here. The telephoto lens once again conveys the same story here same old, post, sharpening effect and in some cases it does mess up exposure. Also, I'm not sure if this is just me, but I'm not a fan of the focal length on the sensor it crops in too much, especially compared to the OnePlus 8 pro. But that is a subjective thing.

You don't have to agree with me on that. The selfie camera was quite frankly disappointing, as you can see on the image towards the right. This phone just straight up, applied a beauty, filter and my skin tones look way off. Not only that it's the pore, sharpening effect that I talked about earlier as well now, in certain lighting conditions, it does a decent job of reducing all that madness. But overall, I'm really disappointed here due to its inconsistent performance, and then there is the 100x space zoom.

I'm just going to leave these photos here. I tried to be a creep uh just because you know I had to play that role to showcase what it really is. Um, I'm not a zoom guy. You might be. I mean, if you're a private investigator.

This is probably the film for you, because if you want to capture license plates- or you know if you're investigating someone for someone, this phone is probably something that you should look into because of its space zoom. So this is the front-facing camera test on the s20 ultra. This phone is packed with video recording features, and it's just incredible, so the front-facing camera can shoot up to 4k at 60 frames per second, the rear camera can shoot up to 8k, though I would never really use AK, I'm perfectly fine with 4k, but man. The video quality coming out of this phone is just insane the stabilization. The dynamic range, the detail this is like.

I would totally be fine shooting video on the s20 ultra, no denying the fact. It's absolutely great. I think there is no other android smartphone that can beat this phone in terms of video quality. Let me know what you guys think about it in the comments: okay, so about that 8k video recording feature it's going to apply a substantial crop to your image, especially when you switch from 4k to 8k. It's pretty difficult to frame or compose your shot uh, and the other thing that I want to mention is that, if you're planning on shooting 8k video, it is going to chew through storage, and the other thing I also noticed is the rolling shutter was pretty terrible uh with some clips.

And finally, I do want to mention that I've been experiencing some glitches trying to play back 8k footage on my windows, PC. I have a RTX 20 DTI. It is supposed to, or it can handle 8k footage, but for some reason, I'm just starting to have issues. Uh you're, probably watching this, as I'm showcasing it to you guys so something to keep in mind all right. I know this has been a long one, but I'm going to conclude this quickly for 1400 the galaxy s20 ultra doesn't have that.

Ultra factor that I was looking forward to there are far too many compromises with the smartphone and let me list them one by one. The design looks stated especially compared to what the competition is offering. The display can't push 120 hertz and quad HD at the same time, something that the competition can also do now. Don't get me wrong. I love the display, it's beautiful, but it's not up to flagship specs.

If that makes any sense, the camera performance is not the greatest, especially with that post sharpening effect that this software applies, and I know someone in the comment is going to be asking me ever: did you disable scene optimizer? I did in fact all those photos that you saw was taken in auto mode with scene optimizer and all the filters turned off it's basically what the sensor sees- and I know I should have mentioned this in the camera segment, but I'm still experiencing autofocusing issues with that main 108 megapixel sensor, even after the latest software update installed. I just feel like the competition does a better job than this. Listen if you're in the market. Looking for a flagship, android smartphone, just do yourself a favor and stay away from the galaxy s20 ultra because Samsung they were just clearly out of their minds: pricing this phone at 1400. In fact, there's another reason.

Another perfect reason why I should disregard the s20 ultra. It's this, the OnePlus 8 pro it's 500 cheaper and in my opinion it has better camera performance than the s20 ultra great display, great battery life and the design is. I mean, look at this. It's more come on. So on that note, thank you so much for watching.

I hope you were able to take away something from this. Video stay safe, spend responsibly, and I'll talk to you guys in the next one.

Source : Hardware Canucks