Product test
Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra put to the test. How good is its 100x zoom?
by Dominik Bärlocher
Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra under interrogation: Your questions answered
6.4.2020
Translation: machine translated
You asked, I'll answer. After testing the Space Zoom in the Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra, it's now the turn of night mode, the screen and the amount of data.
The Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra is one of the big phones of the year. It was hotly anticipated, promises a lot and delivers a 100x zoom that's enough to make you cry. But that's not the only question readers had. That's why there are now answers to mixed questions from the comments column.
The screen and its curvature
In the introductory article on the S20 Ultra, user SwissCrow85 asked about the screen. How infinity is it? In other words, how rounded are the edges of the screen? This is best explained by a macro image of the edge with light-coloured content on the screen.
Answer: It is a bit curved, but not as extreme as the S10. Speaking of the screen, there's a rather nasty film stretched across the screen that you can feel every time you swipe from left to right or right to left. This is unpleasant because Samsung has finally fixed the gesture control. Under OneUI it now works exactly the same as on all other Android distributions. That's a good thing. My advice is therefore to remove the film and either replace it with a better one or cover it with a nano-coating.
Samsung and the darkness
Whether the Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra 5G takes good pictures at night. I was asked this question in the Zurich shop. I didn't know then, but I do now
From a distance or on Instagram, it looks pretty neat. But if you zoom in, you'll see that the software's blur filter is completely overdone. The tree in the centre is completely blurred and the roofs of the houses look more like a modern work of art than architecturally stable constructions.
Almost every camera has its problems with backlighting. So does the Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra. Where the outlines and colours as well as the shadow play on the bonnet are handled quite okay, a rather ugly arrangement of pixels and image distortions can be seen directly above the car roof.
The software also works quite slowly and unreliably. This allows me to see the footage before the AI has gone over it. If you can remember how smartphones used to take pictures in the dark around 2013, before all the night modes were introduced: This is roughly what the picture the S20 Ultra takes looks like. With bright blue and red pixels in the centre of the image and a general blue glow.
After that, the AI kicks into action. Colours are corrected, the blue and red pixels disappear, as does the blue shimmer, and imperfections are corrected using a blur filter. But even then: the result is weak.
For comparison, the same image from the Oppo Find X2 Pro.
Video and the amount of data
User dominikaebli - good first name, by the way - has expressed concerns about the amount of data
The megapixel craze can only be related to well-known cloud services and/or hard drive manufacturers. Where else to put x terabytes of photo data. Then 64, 128 or 256 GB won't go far...
The video above and the few images for the space zoom test, filmed in 4k/60fps and photographed in auto mode, consumed a total of 1.84 gigabytes of data on 32 files. One second of video, mind you, filmed with the Oppo Find X2 Pro, needs 8MB. The Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra needs around 12MB per second for 4k/60fps. However, unlike last year's competition, the Galaxy S20 Ultra can record in this resolution without a time limit.
Dominik is right. Cloud storage is becoming increasingly important if you film a lot on your smartphone. Because even if the Galaxy S20 Ultra comes with up to 512 GB of internal memory, you'll quickly run out of space. The raw video files of the 100x zoom video are a total of 4 minutes 58 seconds long, divided into five files. The Oppo thus generated 1776.6 megabytes of data. With the conversion to Samsung, that would be around 2664.9 megabytes.
We can do the maths: The Find X2 Pro, if every bit of memory is now used for video files, would be full in 23 hours 51 minutes and 21 seconds. The Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra 5G in 15 hours 54 minutes 14 seconds. So you don't have an acute memory shortage. Even if you spend a normal working day shooting non-stop, only half of the memory is occupied by video data.
So, that's it. I'll keep testing. If you have any questions, please post them in the comments column, I'll be happy to answer them.
Smartphones
EUR599,–
Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra 5G EU
128 GB, Cosmic Gray, 6.90", Hybrid Dual SIM, 108 Mpx, 5G
Journalist. Author. Hacker. A storyteller searching for boundaries, secrets and taboos – putting the world to paper. Not because I can but because I can’t not.