Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra Review: Attack of the Numbers!

Hello, what's up guys? Here mkbhd and this is the Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra and it's Samsung's

attack

on

numbers

so this is the huge phone. This is Samsung's highest and most expensive flagship phone and there are many words Samsung could have chosen. use here they could have gone plus or max they could have gone pro but they went radical

ultra

ultra

ultra extremist yeah I think that's pretty accurate so if the question is how can you justify such an expensive new phone ? Samsung's response is to throw out all the hardware at your disposal all the specs every single big number they can think of going to use this phone looks on paper like a great idea how could a phone with snapdragon 865 16 gigs of ram 512 gigabytes of ufs 3.0 108 megapixels? 100x zoom 8k 5000 milliamp hour 120 hertz 1440p 5g How could this phone be anything other than the best?

Well, I'll tell you, but let's start with the design just because I think it's actually the least ultra thing about this phone and it's pretty. simple, it's actually a huge glass phone sandwich with a gigantic and recognizable dual-camera bump, uh, expandable storage in the top speaker at the bottom, headphone jack, you know, for one thing, it combines with the smartphones today, especially in the Samsung line, but on the other. On the other hand, there is no doubt, actually remember when smartphone screens were getting bigger and bigger and then first crossed over five inches on average and then leveled off at 5.3 inches and people thought it was getting bigger. going crazy and then Samsung because who? more came out with the

galaxy

mega which is actually a phone they released and named that it had a 6.3 inch screen it was just funny like no one else tried but this phone was the size of a tablet with the form factor of a telephone. it really was the mega phone but here we are today with the

galaxy

s20 ultra bigger than any galaxy mega or any galaxy note that has ever existed with a 6.9 inch screen its huge for me it still fits in my pocket and it is usable for me but it may not be for everyone, clearly giant phones are not for everyone, I must say that, for an ultra phone, the color options of glossy black glossy gray are a bit disappointing of course, Channel sponsor dbrand will be happy to step up and customize the look on the back. and you can get as wild as this robot camouflage mask, but don't let that be a mistake, Samsung.

I'm hoping for a little more variety next time, until then I'll link that skin under one thing you get from a big screen though, so just to give you the

numbers

6.9 inches diagonal , 120 hertz, 1440p and stop me if you've heard this before, but Samsung has once again created the best display on any smartphone, the best brightness, the colors, the contrast, the best viewing angles of any smartphone screen that I've ever seen it I feel like I'm starting to sound like Displaymate, it's the highest plus I've ever given, you'll know it when you see it and it's not just about the high end specs and big numbers.

They've also flattened the edges of the screen so it no longer spills out the sides and I appreciate that from a usability perspective and hope they continue that trend for the rest of their line. I love it and if I have any. What really bothers me is that the under-display ultrasonic fingerprint reader is basically the same as last year, there are no real substantial improvements and that's fine, it's still decently fast and responsive and once you get the hang of it where is it with muscle memory, it's a little fast, but I was hoping these would get bigger and faster from generation to generation and that hasn't happened yet.

It's worth noting that you don't get all the big numbers straight away, this phone is actually 1080p 60 hertz, pretty basic and you can up it to 120 hertz or 1440p, but not both at the same time. Personally, I choose 120 hertz every time I expected or asked for Samsung's high refresh rate and we finally got it and it's great. The difference between 60 hertz and 120 hertz in about 90 of what you're doing on your phone, which is scrolling, is fantastic and then the screen also has a 240Hz touch refresh, so no matter what resolution you're on, it's remains agile and responsive.

Unsurprisingly, that's just what we've seen on these previous gaming phones. Would I like them to let us use this phone at 120 hertz and 1440p full resolution at the same time? Yes, I wish they would allow it right now. disabled Originally I thought it might be a limitation of the Snapdragon 865 but it turns out that's not the case, they just don't enable it because they probably think it would crush the battery, but I say if you're paying $1400 for this phone and you know what you're getting into, you can still put it at 60 hertz 1080p out of the box, but let us enable it if we really want to, maybe they can enable it with a software update and you know, just put a little disclaimer, hey, turn on both. it will crush your battery but you paid for the phone so you can power it up just fine so let's talk about that 5000 milliamp hour battery in the s20 ultra and this is one of those specs that usually translates pretty well from paper to in real life , the bigger the battery the better and this one is getting my approval.

We know 5000 milliamp hours is huge, but I was a little worried about how well it would perform powering a giant bright 6.9-inch, 120-hertz display. It's perfectly fine, I've been consistently getting over six hours of screen time at the end of each day, easy on battery to save heavy stuff, I play a lot of navigation while driving and I've never turned it off in a single day, so to be honest, neither Don't even worry about it anymore, I was thinking I was going to have to take a few more days of testing to lower it to 60 hertz and see how much battery it saves me, but yeah, I don't have any.

This is a phone that runs all day at 120 hertz, which is great, but okay, let's be real, the big numbers that you guys are probably most curious about and how well they translate are on the back of this phone and those are the cameras so that's Those 108 megapixels are 8k videos and they're even printed on the back of this phone. 100x space zoom, but as we've hopefully learned by now, the numbers on cameras' spec sheets don't always translate very well to real-world performance. I've seen about a million 64-megapixel cameras that are worse than the 12-megapixel cameras on the Pixel and iPhone, so seeing how hard Samsung was leaning into this camera upgrade for the S20 Ultra, my real question at the beginning of this was: Hi, can Samsung?

In fact, it is the best camera for any smartphone. I have a lot of thoughts about this camera, so up front I'll say that it's better in some ways than their previous cameras, but worse in others, so it's still a solid fit. Third for me, I still prefer Pixel and iPhone photos more often than images coming from Samsung, but that doesn't mean the numbers don't mean anything. By default, this main camera does a combination that generates a 12 megapixel photo and it is the sharpest and most detailed 12 megapixel photo out there, which I love, it's one of my favorite things and it's the classic ones. from Samsung, bright and colorful, which generally highlight shadows and soften faces.

All that hasn't changed. There's also the ultra-wide camera. which is the softest of the three cameras, but I'm still glad it's there, it gives us that fun first person perspective and it even has Samsung's much improved night mode in ultra wide angle, which others just don't do and then there. Of course, the full 108 megapixel mode can be activated and yes, that produced a bit more detail, which is useful especially if you plan to zoom in and crop after taking that big photo, but for the difference in file size and the inconvenience of having to turn it on I always ended up not feeling like I needed it most of the time.

I was happy with the 12-megapixel shots, but you do pay a little more attention to the main camera, especially with close-up subjects. There's a bit more to notice there, so keep this in mind: the 108-megapixel main camera is huge, like it's physically much larger than most other smartphone camera sensors, and for the most part, It's a general rule, the larger the sensor, the better off it will be. with more light you get bigger pixels, it's nice to have a bigger sensor and that's fine, but for those of us familiar with photography and video with large sensors, bigger sensors look like this, that's when you start to have this naturally blurred foreground. and the background and this shallow depth of field, in this case the sensor on this phone is very large and that dual aperture feature that they included in a couple of previous Samsung flagships no longer exists, so it is completely open in f 1.8 all the time.

These things combine to create a very thin plane of focus and therefore things that are not in that plane of focus by even a couple of inches are left out, so when I took photos of closer subjects, I guess More than normal, but enough. Noticing this, not only would you see that the background was naturally blurred without portrait mode, but actually only part of the subject is actually in focus and you can see that the rest is blurring, but in this smudged stripe, uh, bokeh of bad look, normally this is not such a strange thing because with a large high quality sensor and glass, the background blurs naturally, but on these small smartphone optics the bokeh is not so beautiful and you really start to notice the edges and Background blur that looks unnatural now and I also think this may have contributed to the autofocus issues you may have heard about on the S20 Ultra.

The autofocus on this phone for me has been unusually jittery and a bit unpredictable and in fact lost focus a few times esp. with close focus and close subjects and I just haven't had a flagship phone have problems like that in a long time and I was trying to figure out why I think the extremely thin focusing plane doesn't have dual aperture mode and probably some don't The software perfectly optimized has made the autofocus on the S20 Ultra look a little buggy. Samsung has already promised some software updates that should fix these issues and I think they can probably mitigate a lot of these autofocus issues with software, but at the end of the day.

You can't beat the physics of having a larger sensor and not-so-good optics, so I think the edges and that very sharp drop-off of fine depth of field will continue. The Galaxy S20 Ultra will also record 8K videos, which is a new feature for these. The Snapdragon 865 phones are getting and that should be my thing, so of course I'm going to try it and I'm very impressed with the images that you can get from the smartphone sensor, the steels that you can take from the video at 33 megapixels. There is some evidence. clips out there, I've recorded a few just for fun and it's fun, but it's not just a higher resolution version of the already pretty good 4k video;

There's like a long list of trade-offs here, number one 8k is locked at 24 maximum frames per second can't exceed that and since we all know that 30 fps is the correct frame rate, that's just a limitation of the Snapdragon 865, it just can't produce 30 fps number two, it increases a lot, so at 4k. in normal video mode you can shoot pretty wide without binning in 8k, but they use an 8k window in the middle of the sensor, so when you switch to 8k mode you see a ton of punching out, which really limits what you can see. you can frame with him, number three. focus tracking turns off again with 8k video, this is a limitation of the processing you get with the snapdragon e65, but it was bad enough to begin with without dual pixel autofocus, so now it's, let's be really, really, very bad for me, is if I don't have a clear subject or far enough away, it will be hunting all the time and that is very distracting and it just doesn't look good on video, then number four because of the amount of data that is processed and the amount of time it takes to process them. from the top line to the bottom line on that chip takes a bit of time and that creates a rolling shutter and to me it's super obvious and any footage where you move or turn just turns to jelly.

I have never seen a roller blind. This is bad on smartphone videos in my life and then five file sizes, it's an 8k video, it's going to be huge, about 10 megabytes per second, so if you take a 60 videoseconds, you'll see about 600 megabytes, which is a bit annoying. to charge so all that combines 8k video on this phone it's great it's really great for sitting still and maybe capturing some slow moving or not so much rotating subjects in high resolution and if you look around you that's what most people are filming in their test. clips of but other than that, as soon as you start moving or have to concentrate, I'll pass, I think I'll have another year or two of measly 4k videos on my smartphone and I'll be fine, I didn't think about it.

I would be the one to say that, but that's the truth. Oh, and you almost let me forget to mention zoom. What is printed on the back of the phone. The 100x space zoom comes from the 48-megapixel periscope camera located on the side. The phone is fine, just because you have 100x zoom doesn't mean you should use 100x zoom all the time, so my typical behavior when taking pictures with a smartphone is that I almost never zoom, I zoom with my feet or I just change the ultra wide, but the s20 ultra has this. Periscope zoom has made it easier than ever to simply pinch in on farther away subjects and take sharp photos.

That's definitely true, this phone takes the sharpest pictures at 30x zoom I've ever seen. From a phone next to Huawei, really impressive stuff, everyone wants to focus at 100x, like when you zoom in all the way and it's cool demo, but the photos clearly don't look good at 100x, you're not supposed to zoom all the time. up to 100 each time, honestly you'd have better luck taking a photo at 30x zoom and crop it later, no seriously just zoom in later, it's basically the same thing, but then of course there are people who trash the 100x zoom because hey no I don't need 100x it looks bad why did they put this on the phone?

But here's the thing: If you're wasting 100x zoom because it looks bad at 100x and you don't think people need it, but ignoring 30x is like trashing. A new speaker comes out that goes up to one hundred decibels because it sounds bad at 100 decibels and no one needs it that loud but you forget that that speaker will sound better at 50 decibels because it is in the middle of its range than the others that reach a maximum of 50. So there you have it, we can appreciate good technology when it's there. I didn't mean to turn this whole video into a camera

review

, but hey, it's one of the most important parts of the phone, so the more you already know, as far as numbers go, the 108 megapixel number is there, but it's not quite there, but it helps.

The number 100x, it's not actually there all the time, although I assume it's printed there all the time and the number 8k. In fact, I recommend not using it, so despite all this hype, Samsung I think is in the same place they left last year with its camera in third place and perhaps a software update far from closing the gap, but the third place and then the rest. The phone is really Samsung doing Samsung things. If you've used the Galaxy S before, you won't be surprised by anything here. A one-handed UI and its optimizations are more important than ever because of how big this phone is, but it's still actually the best. super familiar, add everything but the kitchen sync strategy, there's a ton, there's a million features on this phone, the new feature I found really interesting was the ability to pin apps to the massive amount of RAM, so In multitasking if you tap the icon at the top you can keep the app open for a quick start which loads it into RAM permanently and I was a little wrong with this.

I tried it with Spotify I tried it with the camera app I tried it with my tasks app which starts everything. At that time I didn't really see a big difference in the battery, so that's good and the app really is open forever in the background, ready to launch instantly, so having a lot more RAM on the phone is quite useful and also I feel obligated to do it. Mention that yes, this is a 5g phone, but you shouldn't buy it just for the 5g. I am 18 years old. I haven't had a single second of 5g experience on this phone, but you know if you're on t-mobile or any of the mid-band or millimeter wave carriers, your mileage may vary, so the strategy of throwing all the numbers on the phone worked well.

I think it mostly worked. I mean, this is an excellent phone, the best in its class in several aspects, the screen. being the most incredible and with the battery dropping right behind it, but as we have learned, numbers aren't everything and the question that a lot of people seem to like to ask is do you need it and no, of course not most people. I'll do just fine with a phone that's half this price. You don't need this phone, but as a tech fanatic, I'm happy when high-end things push things forward and are on the cutting edge, and for a lot of those things I do.

I really like the S20 Ultra, and some people who use their phone a lot won't have a big problem spending a lot more on it now. Shouldn't a 1400 phone be pretty perfect right out of the box? Yes, probably, and this clearly is. It's not perfect, but there's a lot of really great things about it and this is the phone I'll personally be keeping until further notice. um and I guess I'll keep my fingers crossed for some software updates along the way. That's been it. Thanks for watching, catch them in the next peace