Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra Review: Attack of the Numbers! By Marques Brownlee

Hey, what's up guys MHD here, and this is the Samsung Galaxy s20 ultra, and it is Samsung's attack of the numbers. So this is it. This huge phone here is Samsung's highest and most expensive flagship phone ever and there's a lot of words. Samsung could have chosen to use here. They could have gone plus or max. They could have gone pro, but they went ultra ultra ultra extremist radical yeah.

I think that's, that's actually pretty accurate. So if the question is how can you possibly justify a new phone that expensive Samsung's answer is by throwing all the hardware at you all the specs, every single big number they can possibly think of they're going into this phone. It looks on paper like a great idea: how could a phone with snapdragon 865 16 gigs of ram 512 gigs of UFS 3.0 108 megapixels, 100x, zoom, 8k, 5000 William hours, 120 hertz, 1440p 5g? How could this phone be anything other than the best? Well I'll tell you, but let's start with the design, though, just because I think it's actually the least ultra thing about this phone, and it's pretty simple. Actually, it's a massive phone glass sandwich with a gigantic recognizable: double camera bump, uh, expandable storage at the top speaker at the bottom rip headphone jack. You know on one hand it kind of blends in with the smartphones of today, especially in Samsung's lineup, but on the other hand, there's no mistaking it actually remember when smartphone displays were getting bigger and bigger, and then they first crossed over five inches like average, and then they sort of evened out at 5.3 inch and people thought it was kind of getting crazy and then Samsung, because who else uh came out with the galaxy mega? That's really a phone they came out with and named that had a 6.3 inch display. It was just hilarious like no one else would try that, but this phone was the size of a tablet with the form factor of a phone.

It really was the mega phone. Yet here we are now today with galaxy s20, ultra bigger than any galaxy mega or any Galaxy Note even has ever been with a 6.9 inch display it's huge for me. It still fits in my pocket, and it's usable for me, but it might not be for everyone. Clearly giant phones aren't for everyone. I have to say, though, for an ultra phone.

The color options of glossy black glossy gray are a bit underwhelming. Of course, channel sponsor brand will gladly step up and customize the look on the back, and you can get as wild as this robot camo skin, but don't let that be a cop-out Samsung, I'm hoping for a little more variety. Next time till then I'll link that skin below one thing you do get from a huge phone, though, is a huge display. So just to give you the numbers 6.9 inch, diagonal, 120, hertz 1440p and stop me if you've heard this before, but Samsung has once again made the best display in any smartphone the best brightness colors contrast best viewing angles of any smartphone display. I've ever seen, I feel like I'm starting to sound like display mate.

It's the highest, a plus I've ever given just you'll know when you see it, and it's not just the high end. Spec and big numbers they've also flattened out the edges of the display, so it doesn't spill over the sides anymore, and I appreciate that from a usability perspective and I hope they keep that trend up throughout the rest of their lineup love that and if I have any gripes really it's that the ultrasonic fingerprint reader underneath the screen is basically the same as last year. There's no real substantial improvements and that's fine. It's still a decently fast and responsive one, and once you learn where it is with muscle memory, it's kind of quick, but I was hoping these would get bigger and faster from generation to generation, and that hasn't happened. Yet now it is worth noting you don't get all the big numbers straight out the box.

This phone is actually 1080p 60hz out the box pretty basic, and you can either notch it up to 120, hertz or 1440p, but not both. At the same time, personally, I'm picking 120 hertz every single time. I was waiting for or asking for the high refresh rate from Samsung, and we finally got it, and it's great the difference between 60hz and 120hz in like 90 of what you're doing on your phone, which is scrolling its fantastic, and then the display also has a 240hz touch sense refresh. So no matter what resolution you're in it keeps it feeling snappy and responsive as expected, which is just what we've seen in these gaming phones that came before it now do. I wish they would let us use this phone at 120, hertz and 1440p full resolution at the same time yeah.

I wish they would allow it right now, that's disabled! Furthermore, I originally thought it might be a snapdragon 865 limitation, but it turns out it's not. They just don't enable it because they probably think it would crush battery. But I say if you're paying 1400 bucks for this phone, and you know what you're getting yourself into. You can still put it at 60, hertz 1080p out the box, but let us enable it if we really want to. Maybe they can enable that with a software update- and you know just put a little disclaimer hey, you turn these both on it'll crush your battery, but you paid for the phone, so you get to turn it on all right.

So let's talk about that battery five thousand William hours on the s20 ultra, and this is one of those specs that usually translates pretty well from paper to real life, the bigger the battery, the better and this one's getting two big thumbs up from me. We know 5 000, William hours is huge, but I was just a tiny bit worried about how well it would do powering a giant bright, 6.9 inch.120Hz display turns out it's perfectly fine. I've been getting consistently six plus hours of screen on time at the end of every day, easy with battery to spare heavy stuff gaming, a lot of navigation while driving, and I've never killed it in a single day. So I don't even worry about it anymore. To be honest, I was thinking that I was going to have to take a few extra days of testing to flip it down to 60 hertz and see how much battery that saves me, but yeah I don't have to this- is an all-day phone at 120 hertz, which is dope, but all right.

Let's just face it. The big numbers that you guys are probably most curious about and how well they translate is around the back of this phone and that's the cameras. So that's that 108 megapixels, that's 8k video and that's even printed on the back of this phone, the 100x space zoom, but as we've hopefully learned by now, numbers on the spec sheet for cameras, don't always translate super well to real world performance. I've seen about a million 64 megapixel cameras that are worse than the 12 megapixel cameras in the pixel and the iPhone. So for me, seeing how hard Samsung was leaning into this camera upgrade for the s20 ultra.

My real question at the beginning of this was hey: can Samsung actually make the best camera in any smartphone uh? I have a lot of thoughts about this camera so right off the bat I'm going to say this is better in some ways than their previous cameras, but worse in other ways. Actually, so it still falls solidly in third place. For me, I still prefer photos from the pixel and the iPhone more often than images coming from Samsung, but that doesn't mean the numbers mean nothing by default. This main camera is doing binning that kicks out a 12 megapixel photo, and it is the sharpest most detailed, 12 megapixel photo out there, which I love. That's one of the things that's my favorite about it, and these are classic Samsung bright and colorful, usually bringing up shadows and smoothing out faces the whole thing that hasn't changed, there's also the ultrawide camera, which is the softest of the three cameras, but I'm still glad it's there.

It's giving us that first person the fun perspective, and it even has Samsung's much improved night mode in ultra-wide, which some others just straight up, don't do, and then there is of course the full 108 megapixel mode that can be toggled on and, yes, that did produce a bit more detail which is useful, especially if you're planning on zooming in and cropping after you take that big photo, but for the difference in file size and the inconvenience of always having to turn it on. I ended up not really feeling like I needed it most of the time. I was happy with the 12 megapixel shots, but if you pay a little more attention to that main camera, especially with close-up subjects, there's a little more to notice there. So keep this in mind. The main 108 megapixel camera is massive, like it's physically much larger than most other smartphone camera sensors and for the most part, it's a general rule, the larger the sensor, the better you're, letting in more light you get bigger pixels.

It's just a typical good thing to have a larger sensor and that's fine um. But for those of us familiar with large sensor, photography and video larger sensors have a look like that's when you start to get this naturally blurry, foreground and background, and this shallow depth of field. In this case, the sensor on this phone is so big and that dual aperture feature that they've shipped in a couple previous Samsung flagships is now gone. So it is wide open at f 1.8 all the time. These things combine to make a razor, thin plane of focus, and so things that aren't in that plane of focus by even a couple of inches are out.

So when I took photos of closer up subjects, which I do I guess more than normal, but enough to notice this uh, you would not only see that the background was naturally blurred without portrait mode, but really only part of the subject is actually in focus, and you can see the rest is falling out of focus, but in this smeared fringe bad, looking both. Normally, this isn't such a weird thing, because, with a big high quality sensor and glass, that's just the background falling naturally out of focus, but on these tiny smartphone optics, the both just isn't quite as beautiful, and you really do start to notice the fringing and unnatural. Looking blurred background now, and I also think that this may have contributed to the autofocus issues you may have heard about on the s20 ultra autofocus on this phone for me has been unusually jumpy and kind of unpredictable and actually missed focus a few times, especially with close focus and close subjects, and I just haven't had a flagship phone have issues like that in a long time, and I was trying to figure out why I think the racer thin plane of focus from not having dual aperture mode and probably some not perfectly optimized. Software has made autofocus on the s20 ultra feel kind of buggy. Now Samsung has already promised some software updates.

That should fix these issues and I believe they can probably mitigate a lot of these autofocus issues with software. But at the end of the day, you can't beat the physics of having a larger sensor and not so great optics. So I think that fringing and that very sharp falloff of the razor-thin depth of field will continue. Okay, galaxy s20 ultra will also shoot 8k video, that's the new feature. These snapdragon 865 phones are getting, and that should be right up my alley.

So, of course I go to test it, and I am very impressed with the images you can get off the smartphone sensor, the stills you can take from the video at 33 megapixels there's some test clips out. There. I've shot some of my own just for kicks, and it's fun, but it's not just simply a higher resolution version of the already pretty good 4k video there's like a laundry list of trade-offs here number one 8k is locked at 24 frames per second max can't go above that and since we all know, 30 fps is the correct frame rate uh. That's just a limitation of the snapdragon 865. It just can't quite crank out 30 fps number two.

It punches in a lot so at 4k in normal video mode. Furthermore, it could shoot pretty wide without binning for 8k, but they use a 8k window in the middle of the sensor. So when you switch to 8k mode, you see it punch in a ton which really limits what you can frame with it number three focus tracking turns off with 8k video. Again. This is a limitation of the processing you get with the snapdragon e65, but it was already pretty bad without dual pixel autofocus.

To begin with. So now it's uh, let's be real, really, really bad. For me, it's if you don't have a clear or far enough away. Subject, it's going to be hunting all the time and that's really distracting and just doesn't look good on video, then number four, because of how much data is being processed the amount of time it takes to process from the top line to the bottom on that chip it takes a little of time and that creates rolling shutter and to me, it's super obvious and any footage where you're moving or turning at all, just turns into jelly. I've never seen rolling shutter this bad in smartphone, video in my life and then five, the file sizes, it's 8k, video.

It's going to be huge! It's about 10, megabytes per second. So if you take a 60-second video you're looking at about 600 megabytes, which is kind of a pain to upload, so all that combines so 8k video on this phone. It's great it's! It's really cool for, like sitting still and maybe capturing some slow moving or not so much turning subjects in high resolution. And if you look around that's what most people are shooting their test clips of, but other than that as soon as you start to move around or have to chase focus at all I'll pass. I think I'll have another year or two of measly 4k video on my smartphone and be fine.

I didn't think I'd, be the one saying that, but that's the truth! Oh, and you almost, let me forget to mention the zoom. The thing that's printed on the back of the phone, the 100x space zoom comes from the 48 megapixel periscope camera sitting in the side of this phone. Okay, just because you have 100x zoom doesn't mean you should use 100x zoom all the time, so my typical smartphone photo taking behavior is I almost never zoom, I zoom with my feet, or I just switch the ultra-wide, but the s20 ultra having this periscope zoom has made it easier than ever to just like punch in on subjects further away and take crisp photos. That's definitely true. This phone takes the sharpest images at 30x zoom I've ever seen from a phone next to Huawei, really impressive stuff.

Everybody really wants to focus on the 100x like when you zoom all the way in, and it's a cool demo uh but photos. Clearly don't look good at 100x you're not supposed to zoom all the way into 100. Every time honestly, you'd have better luck, just taking a 30x zoom photo and cropping in later, no seriously just zoom. In later, it's basically the same thing, but then there's of course, just people trashing the 100x zoom, because, hey you don't need 100x, it looks bad why'd. They even put this on the phone, but here's the thing if you're trashing the 100x zoom, because it looks bad at 100x, and you don't think people need it but ignoring the 30x.

That's like trashing, a new speaker that comes out that goes up to 100 decibels, because it sounds bad at 100 decibels and no one needs it that loud, but you're, forgetting that speaker will sound better at 50 decibels, because it's in the middle of its range than the others that are maxing out at 50. So there you go. We can appreciate the good tech when it's there. I didn't mean to turn this whole video into a camera review, but hey it's one of the most important parts of the phone. So the more you know the better.

So as far as numbers go, the 108 megapixel number it's there, but it's not quite there, but it helps the 100x number. It's not really there all the time, even though it is, I guess printed there all the time and the 8k number I actually recommend against using it. So, despite all this hype, Samsung, I think, is kind of in the same place. They left off last year with their camera in third place, and maybe a software update away from closing the gap but third place, and then the rest of this phone is really Samsung doing Samsung things if you've used the galaxy s before you won't be shocked by anything here. One UI and its one-handed optimizations are more important than ever because of how big this phone is, but really it's still the super familiar throw in everything, but the kitchen sync strategy: there's a ton, there's a there's, a million features on this phone.

The one new feature I found fascinating was the ability to pin apps to the massive amount of ram, so in the multitasker, if you tap the icon at the top, you can keep the app open for quick launching that loads it up into the ram permanently, and I messed around with this a bit. I tried it with Spotify tried it with the camera. App tried it with my tasks, app that I launch all the time. I didn't really see much of a big difference in battery, so that's nice, and the app really is truly forever open in the background ready to launch instantly. So having that much more ram on the phone is quite useful.

Also, I feel obligated to mention. Yes, this is a 5g phone, but you shouldn't buy this phone just for the 5g I'm on 18t. I haven't had a single second of 5g experience on this phone, but you know if you're on T-Mobile or any of the mid-band or millimeter wave using carriers, your mileage may vary so the strategy of throwing all the numbers at the phone did it work. Well, I think it mostly worked. I mean this is an excellent phone best in class in several ways, the display being the most incredible one and with the battery falling right in step behind it.

But as we've learned, the numbers aren't everything and the question a lot of people seem to like asking is: do you need it and no of course not most people will do great with a phone half this price. You don't need this phone, but as a fan of tech, I am happy when stuff at the highest end is pushing things forward, and it's at the bleeding edge and for a lot of that stuff, I do like the s20 ultra a lot uh and some people who use their phone a lot won't have a big problem spending a lot extra on it. Now shouldn't a 1400 phone, be pretty much perfect out the box yeah probably- and this clearly isn't perfect, but there's a lot of really great things about it, and this is the phone I will be pocketing personally until further notice, um and I guess crossing my fingers for some software updates along the way. That's been it thanks for watching catch, you guys in the next one peace.

Source : Marques Brownlee