Galaxy S20 Ultra vs S20+ In-Depth Comparison & Review | Which Phone Is Actually Best?

Samsung's latest flagship smart

phone

s are finally here with impressive new specs and plenty of updates over last year. The Galaxy S 20

ultra

is making headlines with its huge display and revolutionary camera setup, but also as one of the most expensive smart

phone

s money can buy. It's the phone with crazy specs on paper and the only thing that's perhaps more eye-catching is the crazy $1,400 starting price. Samsung has basically taken every particle of There are ten models and turned up the dial to 11 or in this case 20 and considering this. spec sheet it's easy to get excited about the new S 20 line, although the launch of the new phones hasn't exactly been perfect, with early reports of major camera performance issues, although you'd expect the high-end flagship from Samsung was its

best

phone with these problems.

We've been given reason to consider the cheaper 20 plus as a potentially better device overall, the S 20 plus is missing a couple of the

ultra

's defining features, but as we'll see in this video, it could

actually

benefit from this in more ways than we're just saving money and also referencing the smaller s 20,

which

for the most part is just a smaller s 20 plus, but its compact form factor and cheaper starting price make it a compelling alternative in a sea of ​​phones smarter and bigger. We'll compare all the differences in specs and features to see not only

which

of these phones offers the

best

value for money, but also to answer the question which of these phones is

actually

better.

Let's take a look. The designs are mostly familiar, we still have them. glass front and rear panels, aluminum frames and IP 68 water resistance, these are the cosmic black versions, but I noticed that the color options are much more restricted this year, there is only a black or gray option for the s20 ultra and found myself missing out on the more vibrant color options from previous years, like the gorgeous or glossy Note 10, in an ideal world I'd swap the glossy Galaxy glass for the smooth matte textures found on the iPhone 11 or Pixel 4 , but I don't have many complaints here.

At the top of the phone houses hybrid SIM card trays that allow you to expand the phone's storage by up to one terabyte. The entire s20 comes with 128 gigs of UF s3 storage, but the ultra also offers a 512 gigabyte version in cosmic gray, although this will depend on your region, the bottom features the familiar speaker grille and USB charging port, but The most notable change here is the removal of the headphone jack. Now I admit that I almost never need to use it, there are so many great ones now. wireless options out there for headphones that I personally don't miss, but I absolutely support anyone who is disappointed that the headphone jack is gone this year, the power and volume buttons are all on the right side and the big talk button.

It is now integrated into the power button, fortunately this year they are placed in a much more accessible position despite the increase in the size of the phones, make no mistake, these are big phones, significantly larger than the regular s 20 and the ultra feels especially big and heavy on the On the other hand, there's no doubt that having a huge screen in your hands is pretty impressive, but I empathize with those who believe that phones are now too big, it's practically impossible to use any of them. these phones one-handed, even with accessibility software, and there are plenty of jeans pockets that simply won't fit the phone, so that's something to consider.

The phones feature redesigned camera bumps for the new quad-camera setups. At this point we're no strangers to larger camera modules, but the design will certainly be polarizing and the s20 ultra especially takes the camera bumps to the extreme, not only does it take up a huge area on the back of the phone, but It's also much thicker than the other twenties. I'm not sure there is any smartphone that sits so flat on a table. Like this one, most of us will use a phone case which will negate any issues, but it's worth noting that going back to the front screen, the design at first glance may look quite familiar.

Samsung has gone for a central location for the camera lens, which I believe. I must admit it is growing on me and the lens has also been reduced in size compared to the note 10, this means that the dual lens selfie camera of the s10 plus is also gone, but as we saw in previous videos, you get detailed information of the secondary lens. It doesn't really justify how much you sacrifice in screen real estate, so good call. Samsung, the bezels are still quite thin on all sides and Samsung still managed to fit a front speaker grille into the top bezel.

The speakers sound surprisingly clear and loud given their size, although those coming from last year's 10 models may notice slight degradation, the phone uses last year's ultrasonic fingerprint scanner which, as we know, is one of the methods fastest unlocking on the market, but it's placed in a good position on the screen where my thumb rests naturally and overall I didn't have any issues worth complaining about. One of my favorite changes is that the screens are much flatter than in previous years, a change I personally wanted from last year's phones, the slight curve still creating the sides of the near bezel.

We don't see it on flat screen phones, but the curve is not that exaggerated, but it suffers from the accidental screen presses that we have seen in previous years in my tests. So far I haven't had any problems with this. Not at all, this for me has been a welcome improvement, but let's talk more about that screen specifically because this is an area where Samsung can really flex up this year. Galaxy series phones notoriously have very good looking screens, they are sharp and bright. Certified HDR colors and temperament, but this year the last piece of the puzzle is presented.

A high refresh rate. The 120 refresh rate could well be the best new feature this year and greatly improves the user experience. The response rate has been improved to 240 milliseconds to match the high refresh rate and the resulting experience is super smooth scrolling and fast touch inputs. With 120 Hertz mode enabled, the screen will always display a high refresh rate, so which we will not have to go down to 60 in certain cases. In the no-nonsense situations we saw from Google, the fast response time and refresh rate may be particularly interesting for those interested in gaming, where this type of performance was previously limited to dedicated gaming phones and of course , the s20 said it has the processing power to keep up with the most demanding.

Games: It's hard to show you exactly how good it looks and feels on camera, but when you use the simulation in real life you'll see how nice it is to use the phone with one hundred and twenty hertz on. activate this manually as for some reason the phone ships with the screen set to 1080p 60, unfortunately if you want to use the high refresh rate you have to reduce the screen resolution from the maximum setting of 1440p which is disappointing because It has these incredibly expensive costs. smartphones with potentially crazy screens that Samsung is limiting with software, presumably to save battery.

Well, Samsung is right here because using the high refresh rate comes at a significant cost to battery life, but this decision should really be left up to the consumer if my $1,400 smartphone can display 1440p resolution and refresh. at 120 Hertz, which I wanted to do, so we know from other phones that this is a possibility and not a hardware limitation, so I really hope Samsung offers this feature in a future update instead of finding x2. The Pro offers 1440p at 120 Hertz and because of this takes the crown away from an otherwise deserving winner for Best Smartphone Display.

The difference between 60 and 120 Hertz still vastly outweighs the drop you'll see in screen resolution, so for me this was the best. settings for phones despite the drop in battery life we've seen before, how having inadequate battery life can ruin the experience of a high refresh rate display. Yes, pixel 4, I'm looking at you, but what Samsung has done and Google didn't. with their high refresh rate phones including a battery big enough to support them even with 120 Hertz on, the phone still got me through a full day of use without needing to be too conservative or make too many compromises, my time of screen averaged around 5 hours with moderate use and was particularly good with the larger S 20 Ultra.

I found I could extend this noticeably by reducing the resolution and refresh rate, which is always an option and perhaps one that the post with the regular s 20 might want to consider both. The phones can be fast-charged from falling over in just over an hour with the included 25-watt charges, the ultra can also be charged at 45 watts, but Samsung wants you to pay more for that privilege. I noticed that even with the included charges the old one charged even faster than the s20 plus with its larger 5000 milliamp hour battery which is pretty impressive just as we saw with last year's models we have fast wireless charging and power too wireless sharing that allows you to charge other devices by placing them on the back of the phones Overall, the battery and charging capabilities were really impressive and easily what are the phone's biggest strengths with screens and batteries?

As an aside, so far it's very good according to the spec sheet, but now it's time for the part where most of you are actually here for the cameras and these ultimately produced mixed results. The cameras have been completely overhauled since last year and both phones offer a quad-camera setup, but the specifications and resulting performance are quite different between the plus and ultra models, starting with the good images, a characteristic brightness and contrast II, but They're not as oversaturated as we've seen in previous years, they're also sharper than ever on a Samsung device and when the camera gets it right, the images look fantastic and start to rival even the best on the market.

Overall, I found the Ultra to have more muted or natural-looking colors, while the plus had more vibrant but less realistic colors. The plus also generally produced sharper images than the Ultra, but this was often due to focusing issues which I'll talk about in a second. The lens is still the weakest of the three main cameras, but even this produces decent-looking photos, although low-light ultra-wide shots suffer more from noise. The combination of the wide-angle telephoto lens and the ultra-wide-angle lenses gives the S 20 the Atilla-aversion that is missing on the market. Leaders like the Pixel 4 and when it comes to photography you've got more options with these lenses this year than we've seen before on a Samsung phone, but with most examples so far this was really the best of the cases and I am sad.

To confirm the reported focus issues are rife here, often forcing me to reshoot multiple times, it's an even bigger problem for video and the s20 ultra definitely suffers more, but both cameras are often left searching focus, especially with close-up subjects. The Ultra sacrifices the dual-pixel autofocus found on the S20 Plus and older phones, which proved crucial for fast focusing, but it could be the huge Ultra main sensor that amplifies these issues. It's a shame because this year's 4k video would be the best, but it's a lot. smoother and stabilization is much improved, but the focus-hunting issue was often quite severe and spoiled what would otherwise be great photos and videos.

The ultra really had trouble focusing in low light, even after using touch to focus, sometimes even after I finally got my subject. In focus the clunky autofocus would intervene and mess everything up again which was very annoying, it's a shame because when I finally managed to focus the photo the camera did a great job of exposing the image in very difficult lighting conditions using these phones in In the real world, the camera becomes very unreliable as you can never trust the phone to focus, whereas with phones like the iPhone 11 or thePixel 4 you can be sure to take them out of your pocket and quickly take a good photo.

Samsung said they are aware of the issues and have promised to fix them, but flagship phones are expensive as they shouldn't ship with such horrible bugs and we don't have a timeframe on when or if these issues will be fixed, but let's keep our fingers crossed. for the future and I'll let you know if any updates improve the cameras down the line, focusing issues aside. I had a much better experience photographing landscapes and buildings and the low light performance of these phones is really good, the main sensors. They're twice as big on the S20 Plus as the S10 and almost three times as big on the Ultra, so night mode is much better as a result.

I expected the s20 ultra to be superior, but there really wasn't much separating the two phones. There are times when the normal photo mode is actually better. Night mode can sometimes over-process and make images look a little cartoony. The Pixel offers night vision and is widely considered to be the best night mode and this image is more realistic and faithful. life, but the 20s are catching up with Samsung's best bright night warning, multiple photos in a single shot to reduce blur and noise and they have done a very good job with this, there is no longer a substantial gap with market leaders like the Pixel 4 and iPhone 11 and Samsung owners can finally boast fantastic night performance on their phones, but let's talk about the phone's standout features: the hybrid optical zoom and, of course, the zoom space 100 times.

Both phones now have higher resolution telephoto lenses and zoom. Capacity really seems to have been the focus for Samsung this year, the s20 ultra is clearly the heavyweight with its periscopic lens and 100x feature and I for one certainly had high hopes as Samsung was confident enough to stamp this on the back of the phone. As we move through the zoom levels starting with the ultra-wide lenses, there's no initially to separate the phones, although we did notice that the colors are much more consistent with the three lenses of the s20 ultra as you go four times, although the ultra starts To move forward with its higher zoom and at eight times you can really see the quality degrade with the s20 plus, the goal of Samsung's space zoom technology is to deliver better than usual zoom performance, but when comparing the s20 plus with the iPhone 11 Pro, there really wasn't much of a benefit, sure the bricks and wood panels seemed more prominent on the right, but this has more to do with Samsung's higher contrast than the higher resolution compared to another leader on the market, the Google pixel, because I would say the pixel actually performs better, of course the pixel zoom is maxed out here, so maybe the s20 plus is The real benefit lies in its ability to zoom up to 30 times, but beyond eight times pushing the phone to the limit it would be difficult to get usable photos anyway, of course if you compare this to the s20 ultra then it's a different story and highlights the advantage of the ultras, the ultra destroys the iPhone 11 Pro here too but I guess I expected the s20 explosion to be better but pushing the s 20 even further although the Plus model is starting to struggle the ultra still produces very sharp images at 10 zoom times and even at 30x I still think you can get more than usable photos, the s 20 plus is the max here but when I press the ultra 2 the 100x zoom is advertised, I was quite disappointed, it's not as much as I expected a smartphone to be better. a hundred times ooh, the fact that it can even zoom that far is amazing, it's just way below the hype surrounding the phone.

This 100x zoom is supposed to be part of the reason you buy this phone, I mean, printed by Samsung. this on the back of the phone, but I'd be perfectly happy to crop my photos 30 times for my s 20 plus to achieve an equally useless result. Not only do I think this feature will rarely be useful, but literally taking the photo without a tripod is proof in itself. Samsung has been progressive enough to include a mini viewfinder to help you rate the camera, but this really only helps turn the impossible into quite difficult, and without excellent lighting and a very stable handheld space zoom it's practically useless, this is a hundred times the image of the shot, you'll just have to take my word for it, don't get me wrong, the s20 ultra with 10 or even 30x zoom is great, it's one of its key advantages over the s20 plus and it's really what Samsung should have been promoting.

I think if they hadn't overdone the 100x zoom, I would have been impressed at this point instead of disappointed. Another important feature is the 108 megapixel sensor on the s20 ultras which actually uses pixel locking. To produce your normal 12 megapixel image you can take a 108 megapixel photo in a separate mode, but it comes with some compromises that mean it's not always better than the normal 12 megapixel image. The first thing you'll probably notice is that the large sensor creates a very shallow

depth

of field which produces a blood background effect. There is also a higher contrast here, which I think for this photo works very well, but it is only when the image is cropped that you can really see the benefit in sharpness of the higher resolution at 400. % crop, the advantage of The 108-megapixel image is clear, but since the plane of focus is so shallow in this mode, other areas of the image actually become much softer.

When looking at the floor of the door mat, the textures are lost due to the softening at the top. -resolution image, so the original 12 megapixel version may be the most useful image overall, the high resolution mode is much slower and the file sizes are much larger, so if you asked me if I would be angry losing the 108-megapixel feature by purchasing the Plus model, you'd only need to look again at the phone's starting price to answer. PS 20 plus also has a higher resolution picture mode by using its 64-megapixel telephoto lens. Immediately there is a noticeable difference in color which could be due to the fact that these are recaptured by different lenses only when the image is cropped can you really see the difference in resolution, although it is a more subtle difference than with the s20 ultra , but most importantly, this high-resolution mode does not produce the same anti-aliasing issues.

We saw with the ultra and a much larger area of ​​the image in focus side by side, the plus models technically the lower resolution image still has the most detail in the doormat at the bottom right or the bricks of the house at the bottom line, so I'd say the altar's 108-megapixel sensor doesn't go far to justify its higher price than the S20 and the numbers on the spec sheet can be confusing. The s20 plus has a higher megapixel count on its telephoto lens but poor resume performance than the s20 ultra. The ultra has a huge 108-megapixel sensor, but it causes more focusing problems compared to the plus models.

The 12-megapixel lens just goes to show that specs on paper aren't everything. There's a new photography mode this year called Single Take where the camera will record a series of photos and videos in a single take and apply various filters and cropping effects. It's not something I'll use personally and it's a bit fancy, but it could be a fun and easy way to allow you to be a little more creative on the go. Moving on to the more traditional features, the live focus mode produced mixed results, while edge detection was generally quite good, the cameras still struggled with focusing despite faces being automatically detected by the phone every time. that the final image sometimes produces relatively blurry faces compared to other areas such as jeans, which are especially clear on the right, the s20 plus uses the telephoto lens to focus the light, but the wider live focus mode is taken in the mainland, while the s20 ultra simply crops out the main lens for both.

Overall, I found the focus modes live with zoom. provided better results, particularly with background blur which you can see is quite patchy here with ultra mode, even normal photo mode had issues with human subjects although especially focus on the s20 ultra and both cameras were still desperate to soften skin tones even with beauty mode disabled. However, I was quite impressed with the focus on life on non-human subjects and the phones managed this complicated plant photo for the first time. Having good lighting is key when it comes to getting a good life focus effect. It's just Samsung's software and then tweaking to fix the problem. problems, so hopefully the next promised software patch will help make this year's front cameras very good and produce bright, very sharp images once you disable all the annoying beauty mode features, i.e. always There's nothing separating the two phones here apart from a slight color difference where I think the ultra has slightly oversaturated the reds as has the main rear camera.

There is also a separate high resolution mode for the ultra which has a 14-megapixel front sensor. The angle seems wider here, but the difference with the 10 megapixel mode is only. subtle, you need to crop the images to really notice the difference and you clearly don't get four times the image quality with the largest file size; However, there was less grain in the background and this is still the sharpest and probably the best selfie camera. a smartphone, but I don't think this is a substantial enough difference from the S20 Plus, so owners should be jealous. Live focus mode disables the 40-megapixel feature, so there's barely anything separating the two phones here.

I found that it produces the portrait effect. Pretty sharp edges and didn't give the most natural background blur, but it's still as good as last year's S10 Plus and achieves this with a single lens. What interested the person who upgraded with the front cameras the most is that they now support 4k at 60 frames per second I'm sorry for the fact that there is no stabilization but the focus tracking is really bad, you can't even tap to focus so that I had to switch to a different camera mode, like photo, focus and then back before I started recording.

Normally I had to go down to 4k 30 to avoid these issues, which was disappointing. The

depth

of field is also quite shallow and very shallow on the ultra, so overall there wasn't a huge improvement over last year, perhaps the biggest announcement of Samsung's launch. The fact is that all 3s Twenties can now record in 8k resolution. You'll notice that the cameras actually activate when you switch to a K and you'll be limited to 5 minutes of recording at a time, which alone would take up 3 gigabytes. of storage, but as impressive as 8k sounds on a spec sheet, footage quality was generally very poor, focus-hunting issues were worse when filming in 8k on both phones, and with any camera shake, The image was very choppy, often stuttered and suffered from rolling shutter issues, excellent lighting is essential, but even in optimal conditions the video was simply too unstable and filming in 4K 60 produced much better results every time.

If we pause the video here, you can see that this frame is quite sharp and one of the benefits of filming in 8k is that you can take thirty-three megapixel stills, which is great, but the goal of video is to have an image in movement and unfortunately the quality isn't there yet, you might have better luck when you do. using a gimbal, tripod, or when filming distant subjects, but at this point 8K is more of a technical demo than a truly useful feature, not to mention you'd be hard-pressed to find an 8K display that could actually display this footage in its true form. resolution anyway, so 8k may be a bit useless at the moment.

The low-light video quality still isn't amazing, but it's definitely improved particularly with the stabilization, but if you were thinking about trying out HK at night, you should probably forget that it was pretty smooth. There was some overlap between the two phones, as the former often had a brighter, less grainy image, but the constant searching for focus made it less practical to use than the S20 Plus. I think the focus issue will be a problem more often so I would probably lean towards the plus model when it comes to low light video in general some parts of the new cameras make them the best yet but they are mainly the newsmain features that are causing problems so I really hope Samsung can rectify this with software updates, the problems stopped the ultra from claiming the first place is the best smartphone camera and as surprised as I am to say this, the s20 pluss camera is better if you're wondering where the s20 plays into all of this, the depth sensor is the only difference between the s20 and the des More than 20 cameras and as we've seen in previous years this doesn't add much beyond of some AR tricks, but moving on to the final specs on the sheet, those relating to performance were much more reliable, we get the snapdragon 865 or the Exynos 990 and a whopping 12 gigabytes of RAM or 16 for the s20 ultra maxed out, the internal storage is the fast UF s3 storage, so performance wise these phones are pretty much maxed out and from my testing both phones offer super fast speed and snappy experience Samsung's 1uy 2.1 software In Android 10 it tries to take advantage of the new hardware, for example you can now pin apps to RAM to launch them quickly, which could be really useful for multitasking.

Sum-sum brings its own gestures for navigation as a screen recorder from the Note 10 and I've made some improvements to the UI, like adding a less distracting volume bar and incoming notifications. One UI is a pretty decent Android skin, but it's not as clean as Android. There are many duplicate Samsung apps that I probably want to ignore, but the software is packed with features to highlight a couple. New music sharing lets your friends connect to your Bluetooth devices so they can, for example, connect to your car audio system without pairing. There is also a new airdrop-like feature. called quick sharing, which lets you instantly share files with nearby devices and this, along with music sharing and camera features like single take, should also make its way to last year's phones.

One of the biggest new features Samsung is touting is 5g and all the 3 and 20 are capable of that I admit, but this comes with some major caveats. Firstly, the regular s 20 only supports the low to mid band 5g, which offers speeds only slightly faster than the current 4G. On a good day, the plus and ultra models also support millimeter waves, which is the band that offers the incredible download speeds that have given 5g all the hype around it, but this is also the band you should be about. meters away from the masses to use it and even mid-band 5g coverage is still very limited, the truth about 5g is that it's not ready yet, so although I praised Samsung for future-proofing these devices, it really doesn't You should buy these phones for 5g, some people will pay for this feature and never be able to use it, but this may be more useful for those who will keep the phone for four or five years, so the last thing we need to discuss is the price at which you should buy the s20 plus, which starts at $1200 and the ultra at 1400, with the regular 20 just below. the thousand dollar mark for me, the s20 ultra is a hard phone to recommend, a $1,400 smartphone shouldn't ship with as many camera bugs as it has, even if Samsung finally releases the software to fix it, my The main concern is that not all of the problems in the 20s will or even could be fixed with software alone and that makes it much harder to openly recommend such an expensive phone.

The camera is really the only thing that lets it down and the rest of the phone is fantastic, let's not forget. how good the battery life and screens are, but there's a reason why most of Samsung's marketing, most of this video is dedicated to the camera because people actually care, for those who can stand the price, the ultra has a clear advantage when it comes to the camera. Expanding on the larger screen and battery life may be tempting, but given all the issues with the camera, it emerges that the Plus model is not only a better value device, but I think it's a better phone overall.

I don't take many zoom photos so the plus would offer more than enough for me and the rest of the camera just worked. better than the ultra, I guess I'm struggling to see where the extra $200 over the s20 Plus is justified and certainly not the $400 premium over the regular s 20. I think I'd personally be tempted by the smaller s 20, where the only possible downside would be battery life, you'd also lose the depth sensor and a bit of screen size, but it's physically more compact and easier to use. use, which, apart from the price, is perhaps the most tempting of all.

In the UK there is actually only one 4G. In the version available for the s 20, RAM drops to 8 gigabytes, but the £100 saving over the 5g version seems like a no-brainer for anyone keeping the phone for two years or so. I wish you the plus and the ultra. I also offered it if you have one of last year's phones, I wouldn't upgrade yet and if you are looking for a new Samsung phone, I highly recommend last year's s10 series which is now available at extremely good prices. The price will be an area. where competing Android smartphones may undercut the twenties, but if Samsung can really fix those cameras, these phones will be the ones to top this year.

If you're thinking about buying one of these phones, let me know which one you get in the comments. Looking, is anyone waiting for the s20 with s-pen? I'm talking about the Note 20. Also, if you already have an S 20, are you happy with it or are you disappointed with the camera? It would be interesting to know if you like this one. Subscribe to see the full

comparison

with the iPhone and thank you very much for watching. See you next time.