Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra Real World Camera Test By Joshua Vergara

Hey it's Joshua verger, what's going on everybody and the majority of the photos and videos you're about to see in this video are taken on the Samsung Galaxy s21 ultra okay. Now this is exciting, because I am hoping that the s21 ultra can be one of this great creator. Phones, considering that we have phones like the iPhone 12 Pro max that fellow YouTube creators tend to gravitate to when they need some quick b-roll or just want to make a simple video. But of course one of the main things that I'm really excited about for is the 4k video capture. Samsung has been able to do that on their front-facing cameras for some of their flagships. The last few I think- and it's always really appreciated, and in case you haven't noticed, the sun is right there.

I should be hello backlit right now, uh, but from what I could see on the viewfinder on the screen. Obviously, as I'm recording this front-facing video uh, the HDR is doing a pretty good job. Even while I am recording, so yeah looks like the dynamic range on the front-facing. Camera is actually pretty good, definitely better than most now, as per usual, make sure you keep an eye on the corner, so you know which cameras on the galaxy s21 ultra I am using now. The first thing I want to point out in these clips here is look how good the autofocus is.

The galaxy s20 ultra last year had some problems with autofocus, but now that Samsung has added in a laser autofocus here. As long as your subject is right in the middle, the autofocus is pretty pinpoint accurate. Here's a video clip while using 10 times zoom, I'm already getting into the zoom levels, and they are going to be one of the main things this phone provides. However, you can see that the footage is not that high quality there's actually a reason for that, and I'm going to dive into that a little later in the video. Here's a teaser, though a couple of photos of my teacup here, and you can see that there's a dramatic difference in quality.

Again, there's a quirk to this, and I will explain later, while I get my morning tea in me and yes, it was the morning, so please excuse my hair at this point of the video. I just want to thank you for hanging out with me in this galaxy s21, ultra rare world camera test, if you're into camera reviews like this make sure you drop a like on this particular video and then subscribe to my channel, for when I release more real world camera tests. Alright, here we are in the director's view. This is one of the modes that they introduced in this phone, which I'm really excited for because, as you can see in the screen, recording that I'm capturing right now, you get a look, a bird's eye view at all three lenses at the same exact time, which means that you can see what the framing will be like, and you can change to it on the fly in any case, just taking a look at director's view. Let me move over to the wide angle.

Of course, the wide angle is always really nice to have for dramatic shots outside like this, but now we can also get a good. I think this is a three times zoom here uh, you can see it on the side that way we can actually get to it and have it framed up before we hit that button and then, of course, the main lens which uh is the high-powered, 108 megapixel shooter. One thing about this director's view that I'm not so stoked on is that for most of the things that you might want to have your face in well, this is the angle that you're going to get, especially if you're going to show off products like I am right now. This is just one example. Obviously we have ourselves the galaxy s21, I'm going to be filming some b-roll of this using the s21 ultra, so make sure you look out for that video, and then we have here a couple of gives or a few gives that my best friend up in sea hat will send me and even look right here, I'm having trouble getting into the frame uh having to think two different directions in order to get a good shot.

It's kind of rough. I am getting into some of the features that are like the marquee things that I was excited for with this camera, like the director's view, and now the pro video mode. Now, the pro video mode is already pretty nice. You can change up the settings minutely and actually make sure that your exposure and your focus is right and whatnot, but the other feature that Samsung has been introducing in pro video mode is Bluetooth. Audio recording, I'm actually using.

What's called BT mix right now, so you're getting audio not just from here, but also from the phone itself, and I think it's kind of mixing it together. But then, when I came into the pro video mode, I noticed something a little different and let me show it to you right now. That's right! The wide angle camera is now available on the pro video mod, which I think is a great idea. It's kind of a consolation prize to having the Bluetooth audio available for the front-facing camera. But then again, if you are comfortable turning the phone around talking into the wide-angle lens, I'm trying to see which one it actually is, and then you have the Bluetooth audio.

I think that's kind of a good middle ground. Here we are at the Huntington hope you don't mind a vertical video for this one. I just wanted to show off how, when the front-facing camera is at a better angle, this director's view makes a lot more sense. So let's do this hit up the wide there. You go put a little commentary in with my entrance to the Huntington I haven't been here in a little while, so I have the galaxy bus pro in because it's a nice day out, and I'm listening to a podcast.

While I walk around obviously socially distant and whatnot, and then I realize when I turn on the pro video mode, get foggy with the wide-angle camera hit that Bluetooth mix so that it gets a mix of the audio from here and the phone. So it sounds better. It's not going to be quite as muffled as just the Bluetooth audio. Well, I can leave the buds it and every time I'm done recording it just goes back to the podcast, and then I can record again using the phone get these arrow shots, even though I have a mask on this level of convenience is actually really cool. The way everything integrates is really nice.

I'm honestly really impressed with the zoom levels on here. I still don't think it should go anywhere further than 10 times zoom, because it's going to be all digital at that point, but while 100 times space zoom as a concept is still pretty much. A gimmick to me having two telephoto lenses on here has proven to be very useful one for three times one for ten times so going up to three times. That's a good focal length for just sort of typical stuff and then the 10 times actually looks pretty good in photos. It's one thing, but then in video I'm actually really happy with the way that it's turning out.

That way, you can have a lot of focal lengths to play with, and that's exactly what a content creator would want. I'm just throwing in a little portrait video here, as I rest up all right, so I've been mildly trying to get more a-roll shots using the Bluetooth audio via the wide angle in the pro video mode only to find out- and this is no surprise honestly- that the wide angle, lens or wide angle sensor here on the s21 ultra needs a little more dynamic range uh. There were times when I was just completely backlit, because I was like under some sort of shade and then there was a much brighter scene behind me. So that's something you're, just going to have to keep in mind if you do like uh want to use the pro video mode for the wide angle sensor wide angle, footage, but as far as the uh video from this portrait video mode is concerned, this is nothing new, but it's still something that's pretty cool. It may not be 4k video recording, but you do get cool effects like this glitch mode and anything like that.

I can actually change it on the fly. Here's a color point. So everything is black and white big circle which really messes with the both. You can see the bouquet up here and then glitch. Okay, let's go ahead and get into those quarks with the zoom that I was alluding to earlier.

The first thing I'll say is that 100 times, space zoom is probably going to be still gimmicky for not only myself but for probably quite a few of you, because once you get past 10 times optical zoom, you go into digital zoom, which makes your photos look more like oil paintings which, if you're into that's okay, but I think, if you're, trying to get detailed and clear photos and videos, it's not something you'll lean on very often, but what is proving to be less of a gimmick is having two telephoto lenses. I never thought I would say this, but having two telephoto lenses means that you have dedicated sensors for higher quality capture. On the one hand, you have three times- optical zoom, which is good for compressing the background and this focal length is actually one that many creators like myself tend to gravitate to. So you can get more dramatic shots of subjects with better uh depth of field and better, like I said, background compression, but then you get the ten times optical zoom, which I feel is best suited for portraiture and not for getting into the finer details of any given subject. This is something I've seen in the past where the zoom is better suited from when you get farther back, and then you take a photo of a product or a person.

I wish I did have someone like SSA here to really demonstrate this, but what I can do here is. I can show you a couple of photos from the tea that I drank earlier. In the morning I tried to get a very close photo of the etchings on my t-mug, and the first attempt was like whatever, and then I moved back, and I noticed that the lens finally changed over to the 10 times zoom. Clearly, there is something working in the background that is detecting how far you are from any given subject and when you're far enough, it will go over to the 10 times zoom and suddenly your quality goes up, and that made me realize that if you are close up on a subject- and you happen to be able to get an in-focus shot, it's going to look a little off because it's actually digitally zooming into the three times optical sensor, and that's going to be something that you might want to keep in mind. If you're looking to use the zoom levels, a lot on this phone of course getting past, the 10-time zoom means that you're going to digitally crop in, but it's also digitally cropping into the three times zoom.

Unless you make that 10 times sensor get triggered again. If you want to get really close to any parts of a subject, you should go over to the wide-angle lens and then start getting closer in the photo mode. Once you get close enough, it will trigger a macro mode, but this is also happening in video. So if you turn on the wide-angle lens in the video mode, you just get really close. The autofocus will make it so that it is very clear, even when you're really, really up on it.

One last thing regarding the zooms: there is stabilization included here, which is a godsend when you go past the 10 times level, when you go past that there's a window that pops up in the corner, that shows you your current frame and how far zoomed in you are. If you hold the camera steady, it will lock. At that moment, there is a little of cropping going on here in order to achieve it, but this is the same type of digital stabilization. You might end up seeing on even mirrorless cameras, but just like with the macro capabilities, this stuff is available in video as well. There's just no real indicator in the viewfinder to make it clear to you, it's occurring, so what you do is you can get to 10 times or beyond with that zoom, and in this case I was zooming into these ducks in the pond, and once I held steady for just a little suddenly, you can see that the stabilization kicked in it's really great to see that these features are available in video, even if it's not making some big fanfare about the fact that it's occurring it was honestly one of those nice surprises when I was shooting video.

So if you are going to go 10 times or possibly beyond, rest assured that the stabilization will kick in, even if you are doing video. My original plan was to come to this portion of it get like far away from everybody, bring some tea and drink and whatnot, but uh as I kind of predicted the battery life is actually down to single digits right now, uh, that's what I get for kind of using this as like a superpower user and whatnot. I am getting over four hours of screen on time, but to be fair, more than half of that has been spent on the camera in particular, so I've really been putting this onto its faces. Obviously I have to get back home and take a look at all the footage on a computer, the pictures and videos and really assess how this phone performed, but I will tell you this hot take before I get to the outro of this video. I was able to get certain types of footage.

Certain types of pictures on this phone given at zoom levels and all the different features that are baked in these are things I would not have been able to get with most other smartphones, that's a big deal, and so there you have it a look at the cameras of the galaxy s21 ultra in this real world camera test. Let me know what you think of the quality that you saw in all the features that I showed off in the comment sections down below now. I stuck with the features that I was really jazzed about that are new in this phone, but I also tried to just show off the things that were practical for the context of what I was providing here, which was basically a vlog of my day at the Huntington gardens. It's for that reason that you're not seeing too many like night shots or anything like that, but for a vlogger like myself, things like the pro video mode, the Bluetooth audio capture and the director's view are all things that I would actually try to use very actively in order to get some nice, let's say vlogs or just videos in general, my biggest takeaway so far with the galaxy s21 ultra cameras is that I could actually use it as a b-roll camera. The same way that I would with like an iPhone 12 Pro max- and that is something I feel is a big endorsement for this phone.

Just a little of due diligence is required in this exposure, sliders and exposure compensation to make sure that these cameras, which do tend to come in pretty hot, get dialed back just a bit so that it's not overexposed but with all of that said, I'm going to go ahead and call it on this one. Thank you so much for watching and for hanging out with me in this real world camera test, look forward to my complaints and takeaways reviews of the galaxy s21 ultra and the galaxy s21. Those are coming soon, so you're going to want to subscribe to my channel if you haven't already, so you can keep up with when those pieces come out with all that said, though, again I'll call it on this one. Thank you once again, please take care of yourselves and each other and enjoy your tea. Everybody.

Source : Joshua Vergara