Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Galaxy S23 Ultra: Hey, This Camera Has A Pretty Great Phone On The Back”.
Foreign I’d like to start with a confession: I require novelty, I’m not proud of it. It’S a freshness fetish inherent to many Gadget, Geeks matched only by a revulsion of repetition. It’S why I’ve had a hard time getting excited by the iPhone 11 teen or the OnePlus 47 by and large, the world of slab smartphones is the lumbering, predictable March of iterative improvement set against the envelope pushing and risk taking of the foldable world. Give me the hinge every time, but not everyone is ready for a foldable and much as I hate to admit it.
Foldables aren’t yet ready for everyone if you’re one of those everys with the budget for a four-figure smartphone in 2023. You probably already know that the Galaxy s23 Ultra is the best slab. You can get I’m Michael Fisher and yeah, I’m late to the party, but I’ve still spent the past five weeks using it across five cities. To show you why, this year, more than most the burden of fulfilling that Ultra pledge falls to the phone’s five cameras and if you’re, already lamenting yet another YouTuber calling a camera review, a phone review. Hey blame Samsung of the 32 minutes.
The company took to talk about phones at its launch event, 27 of them were devoted to photo and video. So for the month plus, with my review device, I made the decision to leave behind the iPhone that I normally use for the kind of easy b-roll at which it excels and use the ultra in its place. I’M talking about capturing the quirks and bugs and general behaviors of another phone in my review queue this one in San Diego, I’m talking about filming, walk and talk a-roll for a sponsor spot. In my apartment, documenting my Galaxy flip screen protector replacement at the Samsung store in Manhattan, shooting video at a seminar showcasing the potential future of the internet in San Francisco and cataloging new tech, vapor and otherwise, at Mobile World Congress.
In Barcelona, I used the 23 Ultra to shoot footage of the obligatory Hall wandering social robots. I stuck it on a selfie stick to snag some aerial footage of a new phone announcement that amounted to nothing. You know what I mean and I shot a quick reaction.
Video and something of a jet-lagged days following some Hands-On time, with some pretty wild concept phones. Now none of these shots were in ideal circumstances. I often had to use the ultra wide camera to get everything in the frame in lighting that was never the best and yeah. You can see some of that in some of the results, but folks this phone’s footage has made it to four Mr mobile videos and countless social posts over the past month and the amount of usable footage it’s given me far outweighs the stuff I had to leave On The Cutting Room floor, the ultra’s zoom cameras too come in as handy for my work as they do in the wild. For when I really wanted that close-up of the ribbon cutting at a store relaunch or when I needed to click a pic of Carl pay. Through a crowd of backpacked bloggers, what I kept thinking during my time with the ultra was damn wish. I had these cameras on my fold four, especially once I started taking it out into the real world, at the risk of repeating a bit from my s22 Ultra review. I’Ll say that this footage is not all that impressive Until you realize that I was shooting it from way back here. It doesn’t get any better than this phone for bird watching whether you’re talking the man-made Mechanicals of LAX or the chatty, but cute monk, parakeets indigenous.
To Barcelona in San Diego, the ultra, let me punch in on the World War II, vintage USS Midway to find another kind of bird whose tail feathers betrayed that it belonged in fact to a Starship gosh, my friend history would that be. Of course, you are at least a more modern aircraft carrier like the USS Abraham Lincoln across the bay. If you’re, neither bird nor boat inclined, while the zoom is still handy for terrestrial Pursuits, even something as pedestrian is checking how long you might have to wait for breakfast, based on the line at the restaurant across from your hotel at lunch, when a honey bee alights Upon the flowers, alongside your table, you can keep your distance while still watching it work.
Other phone is capable of this level of detail at these Zoom levels with this degree of stabilization, but maybe you’re already saying it all. That was true of last year’s Ultra too yeah. The zoom Optics are basically unchanged.
The big difference this year is the addition of about 92 million pixels to the main camera. The camera you use most of the time now boasts a whopping 200 megapixel sensor. That’S excessive, to put it mildly, and by default the phone will bend the output virtually combining 16 pixels into one to produce a 12 megapixel photo. That picture will get the benefit of all that rich post-processing.
Samsung has worked for years to perfect and it will also have a file size, that’s actually manageable. This 12 megapixel photo of planes getting pushed back at LAX four megabytes in size. This 200 megapixel photo of the same scene, 24 megabytes now zoom into each and you’ll, see why, in the full resolution, shot, there’s enough detail to read the tail number on the plane, while in the 12 megapixel image, all you get is digital confetti foreign, but um Does it really matter? I mean hyper resolution like this was a big deal back when phones only had one camera because it was required to make digital Zoom actually useful, but these days, unless you’re trying to print huge posters from your photos, 200 megapixels is Major Overkill. As we’ve seen, if you want to zoom in on the ultra, you have excellent telephoto lenses for the purpose and shooting in Full Resolution mode, takes a lot longer shot to shot.
What’S more, even in Bend mode, Samsung doesn’t seem to have totally tamed the Beast. That is this new sensor. Capturing moving subjects, especially in dim light, is still as dicey a proposition as it’s ever been, and that’s something Samsung tacitly acknowledges by making available the camera assistant app. It lets you tweak certain settings to prioritize capture speed over quality, but this is more stop Gap than solution. On top of that, there’s not always enough dynamic range to deal with a truly challenging scenario and the selfie shooter is not my favorite not by a long shot, but when the ultra hits it really Nails it. Even as an avowed opponent of faux portrait in general, I’m very impressed by how well the phone did with my girlfriend’s hair, which was really being whipped around by the wind here, the steadier stabilization makes it my new preferred Android sidekick for video, the new astrophotography mode Seems promising and I look forward to testing it if I can never get out of a city and the ultra can always fall back on its sheer range, its parlor trick of being a camera phone.
That’S also a telescope yeah. As I mentioned. Eighty percent of this video, too, is about the cameras, but thankfully there are a few important improvements outside the Optics as well to it Big Slab like sides that give the 23 a boxier build, which makes it easier to grip easier to write on and gives it More internal volume for a bigger battery – oh it doesn’t have a bigger battery. It’S still 5000.. It’S weird! It feels like it does. That’S due to a combination of little reported upgrades that are easy to miss if you’re just glancing at the spec sheet, among them a display, that’s just as gorgeous as last year, but between 13 and 16 percent, more efficient, faster lpddr5x Ram, that’s also more efficient and In every Market on the globe, a Snapdragon, 8 Gen, 2 processor, that’s more powerful, better cooled and you guessed it more efficient. When you consider that last year’s s22 Ultra was already starting from a very strong battery life position, it should be no surprise that I’ve never seen the low battery screen on this thing.
It’S a true two-day smartphone. Sadly, charging is just as Pokey as we’ve come to expect from every Samsung, but at least it hasn’t stripped out the wireless option, like many of its china-based competitors deeper than last year’s, which themselves were even louder and deeper than some laptops. I’Ve used the top shelf specs all add up to Performance, that’s smoother than I can ever recall, seeing on a Samsung what we used to call a buttery software experience from swipe to swipe, and the whole thing is wrapped in Gorilla Glass, victus 2, which is designed For better drop resistance, even given the probable increase in scratch, vulnerability as a result, because you know physics, I think that’s probably a good thing, because this corner really does dig into your palm when you’re going one-handed – and I found this brick like – is just a fumble Away from Doom, should you drop it to your concrete floor? To paraphrase the old sailor’s adage, when using the 23 Ultra keep one hand for the phone and the other hand also for the phone, oh and because it is called a phone, I should mention that. Yes, it also makes phone calls they’re good. Finally, there’s our old friend, the S Pen and by old I mean totally unchanged yeah.
There are no new features to speak of here, the same useful but stale collection of capabilities from magnification to translation, to Conjuring digital art from The Ether and the same damn wobble thanks to those cameras, but mainly I just use it to scribble things. I can’t be ours to wrestle with Evernote just to jot down or for more Precision in a photo editing app when I want to eliminate dust specs or make other tweaks to photos also, I I do still like that. I can use it as a magic wand for the camera. At the very least, it’s a great way to work out nervous energy.
The s23 ultra is available in a variety of dull colors that do nothing to convey how powerful it actually is, and some samsung.com exclusive colors that catch the eye slightly better. But if none of those Hues are doing it, for you do what I do and debrand it, this video is sponsored by my old friends at dbrand, whose real leather phone skins just don’t get old. Well, actually, I suppose the whole point is they do and they age beautifully gracefully developing a patina that shows everyday dings and scratches in a very elegant, totally unique way, and even if leather isn’t, your look, they’ve got tons of options for tons of products. So debrand your device at the link in the description 1200 bucks, that’s what the 23 Ultra costs to start with, but if you’re using the camera a lot – and you will be – you probably want to step it up to 1380 for more storage 256 gigs. To start is great, but over my five weeks of usage, I’ve already filled up 25 of that, so yeah go for the half terabyte. If you can, is it worth it? Well, as always, I’m going to assume the person asking is actually in the market for a top shelf smartphone, specifically one that’s camera Centric, because in my view this is the most adaptable, most capable camera on Android, and you know we can remove that platform qualifier as Long as the iPhone doesn’t have a 10x optical zoom, also, if you already own the 22 Ultra, you can ride this one out and even most 21 Ultra owners will probably still be all right. But if you’re coming from an older phone or the iPhone – or you just want the absolute best of what Android slabs can offer, the s23 ultra is the most powerful most consistent one of those on the market. Those in search of something that will actually give you more Utility change the way you think about a smartphone.
Well, that’s what the Galaxy flip and fold and their ever-growing catalog of competitors are for and I’ll be bringing you more news from that world very soon. This video was produced following five weeks with a Samsung Galaxy s23 Ultra review sample provided by Samsung, but as always, the manufacturer had no editorial input, copy approval, rights or rights of any kind into the production of this content. It didn’t even get an early preview. Samsung is seeing this for the first time right alongside you.
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