Galaxy S20 Ultra review: something to prove

- What you are seeing here is the Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra. And there is a lot going on. It's big, has 5G, a 108-megapixel camera, four other cameras, a huge screen, a high refresh rate, and a starting price of $1,399. It's just a lot. (drum beat) If there's a spec you can think of for a phone, this phone is trying to beat that spec. The S20 Ultra goes big, I mean, you know, literally big, look at the phone. And looking at it I think one thing is blindingly obvious. Samsung feels it has

something

to

prove

. Let's see if it is possible.

The best word I can think of to describe the S20 Ultra is stunning. It has this huge camera bump on the back which can sometimes be a problem on a table. But look, overall it looks like a Galaxy phone. Just pushed to the limit. It's as big and almost as heavy as any phone I've ever used. It is a monolith. He sees your puny attempts at using a phone with one hand and laughs at you. Now, the main reason this phone is so big is so you can have this 6.9-inch diagonal screen. And because this screen doesn't have a face unlock sensor, it can cover almost the entire front of the phone.

Now I thought I'd be upset having to go back to an in-display fingerprint sensor instead of face unlock, but I really wasn't. The sensor is fast and accurate enough for me, so no complaints. But the real reason I think this screen shows that Samsung has

something

to

prove

with the S20 Ultra is that they finally added the option to switch it to a 120 hertz refresh rate. Now, it comes out of the box at 60 hertz to save battery, but I went into settings and turned it on right away and never looked back because I think it has enough battery life to handle it.

And 120 hertz really makes scrolling and screen animations look better and smoother. Samsung even says it stopped worrying about any variable refresh rates based on the content on the screen. It's just locked at 120. Oh, by the way, you can't have 120 hertz and the phone's maximum resolution of 3200 by 1440. But I think it's worth swapping 1080 by 2300 to get 120 hertz. And of course, the screen looks great. Looks great indoors, outdoors, at different angles and with HDR content. Samsung already knows how to do this, it's very good at it. And again, because it's almost seven inches diagonally, it looks good because it's just huge.

But look. Samsung has already made the phone bigger than all the others. Actually, the S20 Ultra is not about that. It's about being bigger in every way, not just size. And there's no better place to start talking about what that means than to jump right to the biggest number of all: the 108-megapixel camera. (relaxing music) So let's get into it. If you count the depth sensor, there are five cameras on this phone. And three of them have a ridiculous amount of megapixels. The selfie camera is 40 megapixels. The telephoto lens is 48, the normal wide angle is 108 megapixels.

The only camera that is not off limits in terms of megapixels is the

ultra

wide angle, which has 12 megapixels. But the S20 goes further. Similar to what Huawei did on its phones, the telephoto lens here actually hits a prism and mirror and redirects light through the body of the phone toward the sensor, like a periscope. It means the phone can get a real optical zoom up to 4x and some really good up to 10x. Then there's this thing Samsung calls Space Zoom, which takes the zoom up to 100x. That's one of the reasons Samsung opted for a 48-megapixel camera on the telephoto lens, so you have more pixels to choose from when you start cropping.

It also does this thing where it takes multiple photos to help get data from all the sensors. help. So how does all that technology work? Well, I tested this zoom with the iPhone 11 Pro and the Pixel 4 XL, both with telephoto lenses. And for fun, I used the Sony RX100 VII. The Pixel 4 XL maxes out at 8x zoom, so I compared it at that level and used a tripod for all of these photos you're looking at. I think the RX100 wins, but you know, it's a standalone camera, so of course it will. When you just look at phones, the S20 Ultra puts the iPhone to shame and I think it also beats the Pixel 4.

So far so good, but what about this Space Zoom thing? Well, you can impress your friends with fantastic little moments by zooming in up to 100x, but I honestly think they look like a mess at that level of zoom. I was able to get some pretty good stuff at 30x, usually by resting the phone on something stable. But it still looks like a phone photo to me. Okay, but what about normal, old, non-zoomed photos? Well, Samsung is doing some strange technological things here too. So by default, the 108-megapixel sensor generates 12-megapixel images because the hardware automatically combines nine pixels into one large pixel.

It is a process called binning. And combined, those clustered pixels are almost as large as they would have been on a lower megapixel sensor. Which helps this camera avoid some of the common problems that occur with high-megapixel sensors. Like bad light, low light and noise. It basically works. Look, for all this pixel binning to happen, Samsung still has a lot to do in the software. Now, overall, I think the S20 wants to soften the lighting, especially on faces, it wants to keep things bright, and it wants to shift towards less red tones. And those are usually very good instincts for photographs.

So, for example, I think Alex's photo looks great. And this purple plant is intense in the right way. But then again, Samsung sometimes takes the S20's tweaking too far. So compared to the iPhone or Pixel, this photo of mine is too softened and too bright. It's actually super strange. As soon as the S20 camera sees a face, it highlights shadows too much, softens skin too much, and tries too hard to adjust the white balance and often gets it wrong. Turn your head 45 degrees where you can't see any faces and you'll be fine. Turn on pro mode and everything will be fine again.

Activate Bixby Scene Optimizer and well, okay, Bixby makes it worse, but still. In many lighting conditions I got good photos of faces, but in difficult conditions things got difficult. Samsung tells me it's looking into it, but there aren't any settings you can change to change the default behavior of what this thing does with faces. The strangest part, however, is that none of this applies to the selfie camera. Which is great. Now Samsung also lets you take full 108-megapixel photos, and there's even more camera tech involved in this, like retiling, but the bottom line is that you need a lot of light to get a decent photo at that resolution.

And even then, my 108-megapixel photos were noisy enough in fine detail when I cropped them that I never saw the point. Now, when it comes to low-light photography, Samsung is doing better than ever, partly because the sensors are so large here. But it still has a lot of work to do to catch up to the Pixel 4. And in portrait, again, better than ever, but it still has a lot of work to do to catch up to the iPhone. However, the selfie camera, which is 40 megapixels, is my favorite camera on this entire phone. It's not too bad as a softener on the face, I just really like it.

Finally, I hate to tell you this, but as is usual with all the phones we test, the

ultra

wide angle camera is the worst of the three cameras in terms of quality. Things just get a little sharper as a result of a meh sensor. I guess the iPhone beats the S20 here, but nothing is really good. Now, as for the video, the main feature is that you can record and edit in 8K, and I don't know, I think it's a little gimmicky, but I like that you can take a still photo. More important to me is the slightly improved video stabilization because I have pretty shaky hands, but you should know that that still doesn't work in 4K and definitely not in 8K.

Last, and you know what, definitely not least, I saw this thing looking for a lot of focus. Especially when I was recording videos. I also really like this new feature called Single Take, which performs as many of Samsung's weird camera modes as possible in one shot. It's fun, but I wouldn't depend on it for anything important because the quality isn't that good. So, that's a lot. There's a lot of camera, which makes sense because this camera bump is really big, right? I mean, it's okay. Where do I think it all lands? Well, I think Samsung has a little more work to do on its photography algorithms.

I think it's going to take them a minute to learn how to take all of these huge megapixels and turn them into something that actually works in every context. Especially with faces. (relaxing music) Now, the S20 phones are the first mainstream 5G phones. There have been a few before, but they have never been the default and with the S20 line they are. Now you should know that only the S20 Ultra and S20 Plus support super-high-speed millimeter wave 5G, which you can only really reach in a few corners. But all of them support mid-band 5G, a little slower, but much more widespread.

Well, here's the status of 5G in New York City. On T-Mobile's mid-band, I was able to go from 45 megs, which isn't much faster than LTE, to a pretty good 120 megs per second. That's very fast. But it's not as fast as what I was able to get with Verizon's millimeter wave, where I saw download speeds that surpassed 1300 Mbps. Which is incredible. I got it in a corner, if I held my phone correctly and didn't turn my body. And I didn't go even half a block away. And I was lucky, because sometimes I went down to LTE anyway in that place.

Yes, that's 5G for you. It's just not completely ready yet. Don't buy this phone just because it is a 5G phone. In fact, don't buy any phone just because it is a 5G phone. (upbeat music) Samsung always has the best possible specs for an Android phone in the Galaxy S line, and this year is no different. But what's different this year is that I think a couple of those specs might be important to people. I'm not talking about the Snapdragon 865 processor, which is obviously fast, but I don't think people will really notice that compared to the 855.

What I mean is things like the battery. That's 5,000 milliamps here, which is huge and has allowed me to run a full day with very heavy use. I have done it several times. 5G might shave a bit of battery life, but it was clearing six hours of screen time with the 120 Hertz refresh rate on. RAM matters too, you get 12 or 16 gigs of RAM depending on which model you buy and that means apps close less often in the background and you can even pin apps to memory which means Android won't be able to close them. in the background.

This may seem like a strange feature for a power user, but let's be honest, this is a strange phone for a power user. Samsung is also holding its own by offering expandable storage and not keeping the headphone jack. And it's okay to be sad about it, don't let anyone tell you otherwise. 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. I still like it, but Samsung is starting to improve it a bit with advanced features. Everything that was ever created is still here, and much of it is in the settings tray and ready to confuse you.

There's Quick Share, which is like Air Drop but only for Galaxy phones. There's Link Share, which lets you post things online to get a private link for people to download for a day or two. There's Music Share, which lets other people with Galaxy phones play your music on the Bluetooth device that's paired with your Galaxy phone. But it's not as strange as Samsung Daily, which sits next to the home screen and simply doesn't offer useful cards at all. Or as strange as Bixby, which is found by long pressing the power button and it's still just Bixby.

Overall, the experience on the S20 Ultra is pretty good, but it takes a day or two to dismiss messages and disable things you don't want. Which is super annoying. So, Galaxy S20 Ultra. Did Samsung prove it could create the best display in a smartphone? If he did. Did Samsung prove it could make 5G a major feature for phones? Well, yes it did, but that doesn't mean your city or your carrier has it. Did Samsung prove it could pack every possible performance spec into a single phone? I mean, obviously he did. This is Samsung. However, it also showed that you are starting to lose your control over the software a bit.

But the most important thing that Samsung had to prove is that it could stay in the camera fight and do it with sensors ofmegapixels and large zoom. And I think when it comes to zoom, Samsung has shown that its hardware can outperform Google and Apple by about 8x, but it's not magical enough to achieve anything great beyond that. I'm more worried about how the camera treats faces, though, because I think Samsung is still going too high there. However, Samsung showed that, when it wants, it can still do everything possible with the phone. I mean, they called this Ultra, which is another way of saying a lot.

And yes, this phone is a lot. (evil laugh) That was dumb. A lot of phone, a lot of phone, so much phone. Phones on phones. Megaphone. Mega phone, it's loud, right? Hey? Thanks for watching. Like and subscribe.