Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra 5G powers up zoom and pixels
One hundred times zoom. A 108-megapixel wide-angle lens. The Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra 5G phone is a headline grabber.
One hundred times zoom. A 108-megapixel wide-angle lens. The Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra 5G phone is certainly a headline grabber. But should we be excited? Sometimes headlines disappoint.
As soon as my review unit arrived, I was hot-footing it to my local park across the road to test the zoom capability.
Sydney Park proved a great location for testing zoom. Sydney airport is about 3km south and Sydney’s CBD skyline is 4km-5km in the opposite way.
I discovered a couple of truths about what Samsung calls space zoom. First, you have a scant chance of taking a steady photo with a 100x zoom on this phone unless you use a tripod, which I did. Even mild wind can cause the phone to shake and affect sharpness at 100X.
For best results, take along your headset, plug it in and use the volume keys to trigger a shot. Pressing a physical phone button, or the screen, also can cause shake. I remember professional photographers taking shots using a cord and trigger decades ago. It’s like that.
Shots at 100X are remarkable. You can capture objects you can’t see with the naked eye, but at 100X, they only look good at postage stamp size. If you blow them up, detail is muddy, and the lines defining objects are distorted.
I could get close-up images of planes on the tarmac at Sydney airport and I also took 100X images of Sydney Tower in the city and, while the outline is clear, details are course and images have artefacts at any size.
That’s a shame because the tech that offers 10X lossless zoom is impressive.
The story does get better. Images magnified 30 times (10X lossless, 3X digital) are good, while 10X zoom images look great. That’s where the Ultra excels with zoom. I took it to a rock concert at the weekend and from far back shot great video at 20X, the maximum magnification it offered.
If you need 100X or more, get a proper camera. The Nikon P1000, a fixed-lens camera with 125X optical zoom that we reviewed in 2018, is a great option for about $1200 and you don’t need to carry lenses. That’s if zoom is an issue.
The other headline grabber, the 108MP wider-angle sensor, combines groups of nine pixels into one big “superpixel” to create a 12MP photo. This approach promises more detail, and the ability to manually crop photos and attain a high-quality shot of any section of interest. It lets you shoot now, and compose later, while retaining great resolution.
I took a smallish slice of what was a 39MP image and still ended up with a high-resolution 20MP image. Incidentally, zooming is restricted to 6X when you choose the 108MP, 4:3 option.
The third interesting new feature, “single take”, shows just how powerful phone processors are.
In single take mode, I spent a few seconds taking an image as if I was taking a panorama.
The phone then delivered me about nine pieces of media, including images of various crops, an ultra-wide shot, and a live focus shot, along with video with clips that run forwards and backwards and fast forward.
It adds filters to a couple of images. It produces all this in a flash.
This phone and the others in the S20 series shoot 8K videos that you can edit on the phone. Frankly, you won’t really enjoy the extra resolution unless you display it on a TV of at least 75 inches, where it will offer sharper-image quality than 4K.
The S20 Ultra 5G camera also features a super steady mode for better-stabilised video, a night mode for better shots in darker environments, a night hyperlapse video mode and an ability to switch from the front to the rear cameras when shooting video. You can go from showing a scene to narration in a flash.
Of course, there’s more to the phone than its cameras. The S20 Ultra 5G is a big phone with a high-resolution 6.9-inch Quad HD+ AMOLED display. That’s big when you consider the regular S20 has a 6.2-inch screen and the S20+ a 6.7-inch one, and they are biggish phones.
However, I didn’t have problems holding this phone. It’s actually narrower than an iPhone 11 Pro Max with a 6.5-inch display, so I can get my hand around it. But the S20 Ultra 5G has an almost borderless display and is longer, rather than fatter, hence the larger display.
The screen supports high dynamic range video (HDR10+), which preserves detail in bright and dark areas of a movie frame. It supports a fast 120Hz refresh rate that equates to smooth action in fast-moving games.
The phone is extremely fast with a 7 nanometre, 8-core processor. My Australian test handset had a Samsung Exynos 990 processor with 16GB of memory and 128GB of internal storage. You can also get local handsets with 512GB storage.
The phone has a big 5000 milliampere battery that exceeds the 4300mAh capacity on Samsung’s premium workhorse, the Galaxy Note10+. I ran our standard video test and the battery lasted an incredible 18 hours, 45 minutes on one charge playing 1080p video.
I also ran the regular AnTuTu benchmark, which tests processor capability, graphics performance, memory speed and usability and it scored an impressive 459,795. There are a few phones that beat it by ASUS, OnePlus, realme and Redmi, but it’s not by much.
If you go for the less costly S20 or S20+, you won’t miss out on similar processor specs.
There’s fast charging, fast wireless charging and wireless powershare where you can charge some Qi-certified devices by placing them on the back of the phone.
Samsung’s 5G offering includes support for mmWave or millimetre wave. Short range mmWave networks support data transmission speeds above one Gigabit per second. MmWave is not available in Australia yet, but it will be subject to a telco auction next year.
There’s an on-screen fingerprint sensor, and face recognition authentication, and the phone also supports the new Wi-Fi 6 standard for even faster Wi-Fi uploads and downloads.
The phone supports both a physical and electronic SIM and you can add a microSD card.
Alas, there’s no 3.5mm audio socket. Samsung has finally succumbed to the market trend to drop it.
There’s very little to complain about with the Galaxy S20 Ultra 5G except for the price: $1999 for a model with 128GB of storage.
You may not be won over by the camera features, however clever the technology behind them is, in which case you can save up to $500 selecting the cheaper S20 and S20+ models that also offer 5G and are lightning fast. It depends on what you want from the phone’s cameras.
Samsung is throwing in a free set of Galaxy Buds+ to entice you to pre-order one, until March 5.
