Description
Samsung Galaxy s20 Ultra
It has this giant camera bump on the back, which sometimes can be a problem on a table. But look. The thing that looks like a Galaxy phone overall, just kind of taken to the limit. It is large and nearly as heavy as pretty much any phone that I’ve ever used. It’s a model. If it sees your puny attempts at using a phone, one-handed, and it laughs at you. Now, the main reason this phone was as big as it is, is so that you can have this screen, which is 6.9 inches diagonally. And because the screen doesn’t have a, you know, face unlock sensor on it, it can cover nearly the entire front of the phone.
Now I figured that I’d be annoyed at having to go back to an in-screen fingerprint sensor instead of face unlock. But I wasn’t. The sensor is fast and accurate enough. So no complaint. But the real reason I think that this screen shows that Samsung has something to prove with the Samsung Galaxy S20 ultra is they finally added the option to switch it to 120 Hertz refresh rate. Now it comes out of the box at 60 Hertz to save battery, but I hopped into settings and turn it on right away and never looked back because I think it has enough battery life to handle it. And 120 Hertz does make scrolling and screen animations look better and smoother.
108-megapixel camera
Let’s just jump right into the biggest number of all. The 108-megapixel camera. So let’s just get into it. If you count the depth sensor, there are five cameras on this phone and three of them have just silly megapixel counts. The selfie camera is 40 megapixels. The telephoto is 48MP. The regular wide-angle is 108 megapixels. The only camera that isn’t out-of-bounds megapixel-wise is the ultra-wide, which is 12 megapixels. But the Galaxy S20 ultra goes further than that.
So similar to what Huawei did on its phones, the telephoto lens here actually hits a prism and a mirror and redirects the light across the body of the phone, into the sensor, like a Periscope. It means that the phone can get real optical zoom up to 4X and something really good up to 10X. Then there’s this thing that Samsung calls space to zoom, which pushes the zoom out to a 100X that’s.
48-megapixel camera
One of the reasons that Samsung went with a 48-megapixel camera on the telephoto so that it has more pixels to choose from when it starts cropping in. It also does this thing where it takes multiple photos to help get data from all the sensors out. So how does all that tech work? Well, we tested this zoom against the iPhone 11 Pro which has a telephoto lens. When looking at the phones, the Galaxy S2 ultra embarrasses the iPhone. But what about this space zoom thing? Well, you can impress your friends with little whoa moments by zooming into a 100X, but truthfully I think they look like splotchy messes at that zoom level.
I was able to get some fairly nice stuff at 30X, usually by propping the phone on something stable, but it still looks like a phone photo. Okay. But what about just regular plain old non-zoom photos? Well, Samsung is doing some weird tech stuff here too. So by default, the hundred and 8-megapixel sensor makes 12-megapixel images because the hardware automatically bins 9 pixels into one big pixel. It’s a process called binning. And combined those bins pixels are about as big as what they would have been on a lower megapixel sensor, which does help this camera avoid some of the usual problems that you get with high megapixel sensors, like bad, low light, and noise.
40 megapixels selfie camera
The selfie camera though, which is 40 megapixels is my favorite camera on this entire phone. It doesn’t do the same bad over smoothing on faces. Now as for video, the headline feature is that you can shoot an edit in 8K. I think that’s kind of gimmicky, but we do like that you can pull a still photo out. More important is a slightly improved video stabilization cause I have pretty shaky hands, but you should know that that still doesn’t work in 4k and not an 8K. So that’s a lot, it’s, it’s a lot of cameras, which makes sense cause this camera bump is so huge, right?
Connectivity
Now, the S20 phones are the very first mainstream 5G phones. There have been a few before, but they’ve never been the default. And with this 20 line, they are now you should know that only the Samsung S20 ultra and the S20 plus support these super high-speed millimeter-wave 5g that you can only get it like a few corners, but all of them support these slightly slower, but much more widespread mid-band 5G. But 5G is not ready yet so don’t buy this phone just because it’s a 5G phone. Don’t buy any phone just because it’s a 5G phone.
Internals and OS
Samsung always boasts the best possible specs for an Android phone on the galaxy S line and this year is no different. But what is different this year is that I think a couple of those specs could matter for people. I’m not talking about the Snapdragon 865 processor, which is fast. But it’s not in a way that I think people are going to notice over the 855. What I mean are things like the battery. It’s 5000 mAh here, which is huge and has, let you run a full day with very heavy use.
We’ve done it several times. Now, 5g might bring that battery life down a tick, but I was clearing six hours of screen time with 120 Hertz refresh rate turned on. The Ram matters to you get 12 or 16 gigs of Ram, depending on which model you buy. And that means that apps close less often in the background. And you can even pin apps to memory, which means that Android won’t be able to close them in the background.
About software
This might seem like a weird power user feature, but let’s be honest. This is a weird power-user phone. Samsung is also sticking to its guns by offering expandable storage. And it’s not keeping the headphone Jack. It is okay to be sad about that. Don’t let anybody tell you differently. The other side of performance is software and for the most part, Samsung is doing a solid job with One UI on top of Android 10. Here you will find a quick share, which is like airdrop but only for galaxy phones. There’s link share, which lets you throw stuff online for a private link for people to download for a day or two. There’s music share, which lets other people with galaxy phones play their music on the Bluetooth device that’s paired to your galaxy phone. Overall, the experience on the Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra is quite good.
