Samsung Note 20 Ultra - its REALLY good!!! By The Art of Photography

Welcome back everyone in this video, we are going to be taking a look at the Samsung Galaxy note, 20 ultra 5g. That is a lot of names. Many of you probably remember that, more than once, I've been pretty critical of Samsung in the past, in particular the s20 ultra with the 100x space zoom today we're looking at a very similar phone with the note 20 ultra and I have to say I actually really like this phone now. In all fairness, I did a really early impressions, video on the s20 ultra, and I think it was a case where the hardware came out, and the software wasn't quite ready at launch. There have been several software updates that seem to have fixed all the problems, and I will revisit this phone at some point. Samsung has great hardware on their phones and when you mix that with software that actually is getting the job done, they've even addressed something things that I've been complaining about since the s10, the over sharpening of images.

So I have to say I've been shooting on this phone pretty intensely for about a week. Now and honestly, I think it's one of the best photography experiences I've had on any Samsung phone, let's start with the physical appearance. Obviously the most notable feature on here is the massive camera bump, and it is big for a number of reasons. First, we do have for the telephoto lens the same folded, optics design that we have with the s20 ultra. This basically means the lens, sits on its side and uses a 45-degree angle mirror and works like a periscope, that's how we're able to have a longer telephoto lens inside these cameras.

So this has been the year of massive cameras on smartphones. I think we can thank the iPhone when the iPhone 11 Pro came out as one of the first that just decided we're going to own a massive camera. On the back of this phone from a design standpoint, the Samsung Galaxy s20 ultra followed up, which was one that I thought was a little awkward, because it's so big the phone actually becomes a little front heavy and, of course, now we have this on the note and I like the way that Samsung kind of own up to it, it's a spotless design. It does stick out quite a bit. I've seen reviews where people say this is a point where it could be damaged, but I would say, get a case and take care of your phone.

If that is a concern, I actually kind of like this design. I think it is very cool. It's very clean and, what's fascinating is when you compare it to last year's note, it's quite striking, so the cameras are much more massive and there's a lot of other differences physically from the note 10. , the s pen has been moved to the other side and the buttons have been flip-flopped as well, but it's still a very familiar and comfortable phone to be able to use. I think, though, that with the note 20 ultra that Samsung really stepped up their design game on this, it is a beautiful phone.

So I want to add something about the Samsung flagships, so the note is usually delineated by a flatter design and, of course we have the s pen. This is a phone that I've always preferred from a creative standpoint. It feels like a phone that is actually designed for creative work. We've got the s pen we can draw, we can write, we can actually translate our handwriting into text now, and it really has a lot of applications. I think that would apply to people who do creative work.

I think the weak link in last year's model, with the note 10, was the camera system. Furthermore, I could get perfect images on the note, 10 and did many times. Furthermore, I think the night sight was perfect. It's actually pretty adequate. You can use it kind of for street photography stuff like that.

It actually is a lot of fun to use and when you start, pixel peeping you're going to notice that the lenses were not that great, and I think the product, just in general, has matured a lot over the last year. There's some other differences too, like for instance, when you turn the handwriting into text. It only worked if you used it in portrait mode. When the phone came out, if you flipped it onto its side, it couldn't figure out what the text was that has been addressed. It's been fixed, there's been a lot of software updates, we're going to talk a little about the camera software in here, and I think this product has actually matured to a point right now, where this really is a viable option for people who want to do creative work on a phone.

If we look under the hood, the hardware is pretty much what you'd expect from an expensive flagship phone. It's snapdragon 865, plus this version actually has 128 gigabytes of storage. You can do 512 as well, which is expandable with the external slot up to one terabyte. This is why I opted for the 128 over the 512. It's a way you can save a little of money.

At least this one has 12 gigabytes of ram. The screen is unbelievably good. It is a 6.9 inch, OLED screen. It has a 120 hertz refresh rate. Furthermore, it is really bright and by really bright I mean really bright.

Furthermore, it's a big screen, first, but even on its lowest setting. If you're like me- and you tend to read at night with the lights out before you go to bed, this phone probably won't dim to your liking enough. It is just amazing, but I would rather have that problem than a screen that is too dim, let's just say in daylight, for instance, one thing that seems to be missing is the headphone jack, but that's pretty much to be said for any flagship smartphone these days everybody tends to go Bluetooth and wireless with the headphones. The battery in this phone is a 4 500 William battery. Now the s20 ultra has a 5000mah battery.

It used to be that that would give you a lot of time like if you had to go a full day and part of the night without charging you'd, probably still be okay. The next morning. That's really not the case anymore. These are driving big screens, there's a lot going on in the phone, but they're pretty good. You can kill it in a day, but I've found in general, it's very acceptable.

So as a photographer, I'm obviously looking at this phone from a photography standpoint and I want to dive and check out the cameras, because there's a lot of cool stuff, that's going on here, but real quick. I want to give a shout-out to our sponsor today, who are the awesome folks over at yellow images. Yellow images are your one: stop shop for high quality premium, mock-ups creative fonts they've got 360 images. They've got a creative store, full of amazing graphic assets, everything from lettering, icons, illustrations patterns, brushes, UX, UI kits, and much more. Using yellow images templates for your projects is going to save you both time and, of course, revisions.

This is the smarter way to work, presenting your ideas rather than using abstract pitches. That require a lot of explanation. You can get your work to look much more professional in way less time, yellow images updates their library daily so that you can always find anything. You want. They've got a collection of over 40, 000 lockups, so chances are.

They have exactly what you need, oh and by the way. Just for you guys, I asked yellow images for a 20 discount guess what they came through, and I've got a couple coupons that you guys can claim today. Now these are limited, so it's first come first served, but you can get your 20 off by using the offer code. Ted Forbes, 20. Just use the link in the description, and I want to give a special shout out and thank you to the awesome folks over at yellow images for sponsoring this video.

The camera setup on the note 20 ultra is very similar to what we have on the galaxy s20 ultra. The biggest difference is on the note 20 ultra. We do have the laser autofocus sensor, and this helps enormously with the hunting and seeking problem that I initially had on the s20 ultra. I will argue that software has tamed that down considerably it's, but it's just better and faster. On the note, the main camera is the same: 108 megapixel, f 1.8 one over 1.33 inch sensor, which is going to be a much larger sensor. That's why, when you look at images taken with this camera, you're actually going to get depth of field, this is not faked.

In software, this actually is both from the lens, and I think it's actually really cool. The downside of this is because these cameras are all fixed aperture. You can't stop down to increase that depth of field. The best you can do is step away from things, so sometimes it can be challenging to get things really sharp when that's the desired effect that you want, but I do like the versatility of having that shallow depth of field. Personally, we also have an ultra-wide camera that comes in at 12 megapixels at f 2.2 and, of course, I talked a minute ago about the periscope or folded optic telephoto lens, which is a 12 megapixel with an aperture of f 3.0. Now, let's talk about aperture for just a second, because this is a challenge with optical design.

Now aperture refers to the opening where light enters the lens, and it is a measurement of how wide that is so a wider aperture or a smaller number. So, for instance, on the main camera, it's an f 1.8. It's going to allow more light to come in on the telephoto. It's going to be an f 3.0. Why is it an f 3.0, not an f 1.8? Well, they could do an f 1.8. I suppose, but it's going to be huge and there's already a huge design challenge with how to fit this into the phone as it is.

So that's the best we're going to do now. Samsung used to have this really annoying habit, and this goes all the way back on all their phones that had telephoto lenses so like even the s10, the note 10 so-and-so forth is they would auto switch it without you, knowing? So, if the camera sensed that it did not have enough light, and it was just going to be a grainier image that required a higher ISO setting, then what it would do is it would switch to a digital zoom on the main camera. This used to drive me nuts. In fact, when I got this phone, I was prepared to be furious about it, because this lens looks really great when you're in bright light. But sometimes let's say you were going to shoot in darker light, and you've got it on a tripod.

Well, Samsung have actually fixed that, and now it's nowhere near as sensitive. I think their algorithms for noise reduction have gotten better, and it's just a perfect lens. Overall. I've also noticed that with the s20 ultra, this is also fixed as well, so it doesn't do the flip-flop thing back and forth. It just drove me nuts that you think you're using this lens that is specific to this camera and unique, and they're, not actually letting you use it, and you're going to a digital zoom, but that isn't the case anymore.

So bravo Samsung. That is a huge leap forward. Another complaint that I've had about Samsung's camera software in general is that it tends to expose the images a little to the bright side, almost leaning towards overexposure, even though it has auto HDR, and it can kind of compensate, but still the images are really bright. I constantly found myself having to manually turn down the exposure in the phone, and this is no longer a problem either and another cool thing is: I used to complain about over sharpening of images. They are still sharpened, but it's much more tamed down and less phony.

Looking now, they've really done a lot of nice work with the software, and I think this is just another example of products maturing. I think that phone manufacturers have a very difficult task in that. We've set this precedent where there will be a new model every year, whether we need it or not, and so to push forward at that faster rate and to be able to keep up with that on the software end of things, it's really difficult, and so it's really cool to see Samsung in the spot. Now, where all the stuff is starting to mature, and you can get perfect images that actually rival proper cameras, I have to say- and because I just tend to forget this- usually- and I always get asked the front facing or the selfie camera is a 10, megapixel, f 2.2, so video capture, just like the s20 ultra, we can do 8k video capture now this happens because our main camera is 108 megapixels, so we certainly have room to do it. Is it something you want to do? I think it's into the gimmick territory to be quite honest with you.4K is enough for anybody and to be honest if you're going to share stuff on Instagram or Facebook, or social media, or you're, going to even text it to somebody, it's probably going to down scale to 1080p. Anyway, so I'm not really sure what the clear advantage is to shooting 8k on these phones plus the data rate, in other words, how much data per second are we using gets so small when you're shooting at 8k? I just don't see the advantage there, and it's also like when you shoot raw photos in 108, megapixel mode.

It's going to open up all of these blemishes and inadequacies that you're going to get out of the lenses now. This brings me to another interesting point about phone specs. Now smartphones come from the tech world, which I think is great, but that's why we typically spec these out in terms of the chipset. That's in there the amount of memory, the amount of storage so-and-so forth. What you can do with the phone from a technical perspective.

However, it has been typically the tradition that we don't talk about lenses. In the same way, you have to really dig information and right now I can't find any because this phone is so new about how many elements are in here and what exactly goes into this now there is a whole art to optics, and there are people who specialize in that who work for smartphone manufacturers that are constantly building on these, and they look perfect, and it's interesting because, like, for instance, with the folded optic design with the telephoto lens or the periscope look where we're putting a lens in sideways we're allowing for a bigger lens. So there has been development in this area and I would love to see more specs on lenses, because I personally think that is going to be the next frontier when we actually open this camera up to shoot at 108 megapixels, and you start exposing all the inconsistencies and weirdness in there. This phone holds up pretty good, I think better than the ultra did and as far as I know, they're the same lenses. So it could be a case of consistency from camera to camera in terms of what the lenses are going to do.

There's a lot of tiny parts in here, but that is something that I would like to see improved on for the future, just in smartphones in general. Another area that I think deserves a little of improvement is the possibilities of what we could do with the s pen for photography right now. It's simply you push on the click button to take an image you can also hold down on the button and use gestures to do things like change the lens. You can do things like change the mode that you're in, or you can even do this awkward thing where you're trying to twist in a circular motion to adjust the zoom angle. This needs to be improved on, but it just seems to me that the s-pen could be used for other things as well, and it could be a little more customizable.

That's something that I really would like to see. Samsung run with in future phone design, there's also a few really cool additions on the software side of things. So, for instance, now we have a pro video mode which allows you to shoot at 24p. So if you want to get a cinematic look, you can now do that with the pro video mode. It also allows you to have full control over manual exposure.

Now video has come a long way. I think in the last couple of years on a lot of smartphones. I think the iPhone in general had great image stabilization, and it was one of the first ones to take off the Xperia one mark ii from Sony is incredible, and I think Samsung are stepping up their game too. So this is a really welcome addition and by the way, this is now on the s20 ultra as well. It came in a software update, so you might want to check that out if you're into the video side of things, so a lot of really cool camera features in the note 20 pro, as most of you guys know, I am one who has been pretty critical of Samsung in the past.

I thought that the 100x space zoom really personified a lot of that. It is a digital zoom at that point, and it really wasn't very good, and I felt like there was a lot of marketing going into these and Samsung were missing an opportunity to do one of the best cameras out there with the note 20 ultra, and I have to say that the software development team on the back end has fixed a lot of things too. So I think you're going to see an upgrade with the s20 ultra and I actually would like to revisit this phone and do a little review on that as well, because this got a major upgrade with software, and I just think that Samsung are doing some amazing things right now. A lot of the things that I've been very critical about, they've, actually fixed, and I'm really impressed so hats off to Samsung- would love to know what you guys think so drop me. A comment below I'll see you guys in the next video until then later.

Source : The Art of Photography