Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “The Flagship vs Midrange Debate: Galaxy A54 Review!”.
Foreign, so here’s the thing I used to be able to say: cheap phones are getting good and good phones are getting cheap because it was true for a while there. But then we started getting these more and more expensive Flagship phones. They broke through this thousand dollar price barrier. We’Ve got super expensive phones now, so I can no longer stand by the second half of that statement, but the first half still pretty compelling, and so this is the Samsung Galaxy a54, which just came out pretty recently and represents roughly the middle-ish of Samsung’s lineup, where They’Ve got phones at every price from like 160 bucks, all the way up to nearly two thousand dollars, and this one actually has a great case to be the best value in the entire lineup. I didn’t expect to say that, but I’m saying it now because I’ve been using this phone for the past two weeks and it actually delivers very well on a lot of the premium smartphone experience, but at literally a third of the price of the flagship.
From the same company literally, this phone MSRP is like 400 450 bucks right now. You sign the right contract in the US. You can basically get it for free and the flagship that I’ve been daily driving for, like the first half of this year. So far is the s23 ultra which retails for twelve hundred dollars still so what I wanted to find out and show you in this article is: how close does this a54 get to this s23 Ultra or any of these Mega flagships that are like it, because it’s Definitely not a third of the functionality, so I’m breaking this down into five categories, because these are my five pillars of a great smartphone: build quality, display performance, camera and battery.
So I’ve said before: if a smartphone can nail all five of these things, then it’s a good phone period And as a product goes down in price, then you naturally expect it to start to make some sacrifices in some of these areas. So right from the top with build quality, it gets interesting because Samsung kind of adopted this thing where they use essentially the same design language across their entire lineup, to keep it consistent and recognizable by. But that also basically means that this 1200 phone does not look dramatically different from this 400 to 450 phone Samsung is one of these companies. That only does the satin slash matte finish on the backs of their most premium phones and so the squared off rails. On the s23 ultra are a polished aluminum. For contrast, the a54, on the other hand, is the other way around it’s glossy glass on the back and it’s a more Satin finish on the aluminum rails, and I kind of like that too. At the end of the day, though, they’re literally both glass and aluminum, and so really it comes down to two main differences between the two one is the size.
They only come in these sizes, and so this a54 is definitively smaller and lighter than the ultra and two it’s flat and that’s totally fine, where the ultra does have this little bit of a curve on the sides of the display. But, to be honest, yeah build quality is very close here. It is IP67 versus ip68, which, by definition, is almost the same thing, and the a54 puts the SIM card slot, plus a expandable storage at the top, where the flagship just has a SIM card tray at the bottom, with no expandable storage.
If I can safely assume that both Gorilla Glass, 5 and Gorilla Glass, vectus 2, both scratch at a level six with deeper grooves at a level seven, I feel pretty comfortable saying that the a54 is 90 of the build quality of the flagship, which is a really Good start so then there’s the displays. Now this is Samsung we’re talking about here, so they definitely go. The extra mile with the flagship display, no question about that. It is ridiculously good. Incredibly, bright, super sharp, responsive adaptive and efficient, I mean every number on paper – is pretty close to maxed out from the 1440p resolution to the 1750 nits of brightness from an AMOLED panel, 120 hertz Max refresh rate, but variable down to one Hertz with ltpo. I mean it’s pretty awesome, so the a54 display is a step down on paper sure and when you actually use it, you realize that they’ve cut out like the extra bells and whistles the over-the-top stuff that are maybe a little more for The Fringe situations, but still Keep the screen to a pretty premium level for 99 of use cases so, like I said this only comes in one size, so it’s a little smaller in the flagship, but that’s also probably a good thing for some people, because phones are huge.
So this is a 6.4 inch, 1080p flat AMOLED. This is still over 400 pixels per inch. So, even though it can’t do Quad HD, it’s still going to be pretty great for most people that aren’t pixel peeping like I am, and it’s still plenty bright. I mean I’m looking at this thing.
It gets up to a thousand nits and regularly goes outdoors and looks totally fine, like in the dashboard of my car and out in the sun, no problems so in that way it’s pretty close, but you can also see the bezels all the way around are a Little bit thicker: this is one of those things that tends to get like pointed out in YouTube comments more than by people actually buying the phone but yeah it’s true. It does have slightly bigger bezels and a bigger chin. It’S not completely corner to corner and then, while the s23 ultra has the ltpo that can adapt all the way from 120 hertz down to 1 Hertz when it’s not moving. This a54 display can adapt from 120 hertz down to 60 hertz and basically switch back and forth, so not quite as adaptive and efficient but better than nothing, and it goes pretty blue off axis more than some of the more premium Samsung panels already do, and also That hole, punch, cut out, as I pointed out before, is not quite the little perfect black circle, but it does have this little shiny metal ring that can be slightly distracting when the Sun hits it at just the right angle.
It’S a small thing, but I got ta mention it, but yeah. They still give you every single setting in here as the more expensive phone to dial in the display’s colors and match what you’re looking for so overall, I’m willing to say the a54 has 80 of the display of the flagship. It’S obviously not going to match it.
On paper and in the most bleeding edge extreme situations like direct outdoor, sunlight and things like that, then you can see the difference, but honestly, most of the time when you’re, just using the phone especially indoors, they look very similar, which is pretty amazing. Just with slightly thicker bezels, so then there’s performance now. This is where you start to get a little bit of a wider Gap here.
So you’ve already heard about the flagship: Snapdragon 8 Gen, 2 8 gigs of RAM one terabyte of storage, all that good stuff uh. This is working with a lesser chipset here, so it’s it’s just not going to be as good, so the a54 is powered by an exynos 1380 chip which benchmarks about 50 to 80 percent lower than the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 in CPU. It’S it’s a very comfortably mid-range chip. I’Ll put it that way for context.
It’S putting up similar geekbench scores to the a12 bionic, which was in the iPhone 10s in 2018., so pair this with six gigs of RAM and you’ve got a phone that you know can handle everyday tasks, but it isn’t blowing anything out the water in terms of Performance and the specs are only part of performance like when I, when I say performance as a pillar. Obviously, you want it to be able to open apps very quickly and be smooth and reliable, so for normal, daily things like checking, email or social media scrolling or just subscribing to this YouTube channel like it feels just like the flagships, because it’s fine and it’s also 120 hertz and it’s smooth that stuff doesn’t require a super high-end chip. Now sure there are few dropped frames here and there and it does feel a little bit different.
And if you gave me these two phones and didn’t tell me which was which sooner or later I could tell you which one was a lower end chip. But it would require me starting to push you know some higher end stuff, starting to multitask, starting to flip between a couple heavier apps at once, opening and closing a few things when you get to like navigating while streaming music over bluetooth. You know, while reading something in a web browser on a big website stuff like that, then the difference is actually really quite noticeable and then the s23 line all has these like Lightning Fast, ultrasonic fingerprint sensors.
While the a54 does have an optical sensor, which is just a bit slower and has to shine a light for a second instead of the ultrasonic ones, which are more versatile, you could also argue that built-in storage is going to be faster than expandable. Although some people, just don’t care like they just want expandable storage, in which case that’s actually a benefit for the a54 but yeah, it’s it’s pretty clear that the performance difference between Flagship, chipset and mid-ranger is pretty big. It’S noticeable! It’S a it’s a feel thing. It’S a smoothness thing: if you haven’t used a more expensive phone, you might not even notice, but that’s what it comes down to and especially with the higher end tasks. These phones are running the same software, one UI 5.1, but just one executes the same stuff. A little more reliably and smoother, so I’m going to give a54 60 of the performance of the flagship, not bad.
So now, cameras, cameras, cameras, cameras, we got all kinds of cameras. Typically, cameras are what separate the good phones from the great phones and that’s still true. So you look at the back of the a54 and it looks just like all the rest of the s23 series, obviously not as many cameras as the ultra, but when you actually hear that this is the 50 megapixel main camera. And this is the 12 megapixel Ultra wide, and this is a 5 megapixel macro now you’re, starting to see where they saved money like in what world do you want a macro camera over a zoom camera? This is the obvious version of like making it look like the more expensive phone, but saving some money not putting a zoom but still having something there.
So now the actual photo and video taking experience is the same as the more expensive phones. Literally, it’s the same app, the same UI, the same features and buttons. So that’s fine. We can all say what we want about Samsung’s layouts, but you know they work, they’re, pretty straightforward and then the photos you get in good lighting. They seem perfectly fine like if you don’t compare it to something super expensive. These are all super passable, sharp, detailed, normal looking photos, maybe a little bit blue with the white balance a little bit Overexposed but honestly short of the pixel 6A. This is about as good as you’d expect from a 450 phone, but of course, like I said, my goal is to compare it to the super expensive, big brothers. So when you do, that highlights a little more some of the flaws of the a54’s main camera, which really is just that it tends to overexpose and take unnecessarily bright shots quite often, and the white balance is a little inconsistent.
But it’s funny. There’S always this angle. Always feels weird, because most people buying this phone have never they have. They haven’t come from a 1200 phone.
They don’t know what a 1200 phones capabilities would be. So it’s like comparing a Toyota Corolla to a Supra sure they come from the same company, but like people buying the Corolla, weren’t cross shopping with a Supra and they weren’t even thinking about getting a performance of a Supra. So just me, putting them side by side helps highlight the differences uh, but yeah this camera’s set is fine. I think sometimes I boil the camera all the way down to like yeah this one’s just fine, but I really mean it. It’S fine like when you zoom in yeah, you lose sharpness because you went with a macro over a telephoto, so it doesn’t come close to touching the zoom performance of the more expensive phone passed about four or five x.
The a54 also can’t do 8K, video or even 4K 60, like the flagship can, but it can do everything else. Just fine and the ultra wide is pretty soft as expected, especially in lower light, but it happens to actually be a tiny bit wider than the flagship’s ultra wide. So it’s got that going for it.
You know between the missing telephotos and the Lesser compute power. This one can go in a bunch of different directions, but I’ll say the a54 is 70 of the camera for most normal photos of the flagship which is pretty good, but then last but not least, battery this one’s pretty simple, five thousand milliamp hours, 5000 milliamp hours And so it turns out the usable daily battery life of these two phones is pretty similar, but the thing about the chips, though, is the the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, which is in a lot of the higher end newer phones. Now is it’s really good? It’S.
It’S also it’s both more powerful and more efficient uh than the XML. So basically, this flagship phone is capable of way more. It’S capable of a much higher Peak output, and so you can actually Spike the usage a lot and like run down the battery pretty hard. If you wanted to, but then it’s also more efficient, so for you know combining it with this ltpo display just using it every day, regular scrolling social media email hanging out.
You know this is It’s Sip and Battery it’s actually going slower through battery than the a54. So the a54 is more of a constant drain. It doesn’t Spike as high, but it doesn’t have as good standby time. So the the curve of the flagship phone might look more like spiky, but the a54 looks more like an even descent. If that makes sense now you also do not get wireless char charging with the a54 despite the glass back.
That’S one of those features that you sometimes see in phones at this price, but it’s definitely a common emission and the max charging rate is 25 watts, which is straight up slow in 2023. But it’s fine! It’S serviceable. There are all kinds of phones offering blazing fast, like 50 80, 100 plus watt charging, even at this lower price point. So even if the battery isn’t amazing, you could at least top up quickly if you had that, but that’s not here either so it’ll.
Take about an hour to charge from zero to 100, totally average, but overall it’s it’s not a substantial weakness, especially versus the flagship from the same company, which only does 45 Watts so a54 battery experience is is like 90 of the flagship. So if you total up all of my assessments, uh and average them out over 500 points, you get 78 of the flagship for a third of the price which that seems like it’s pretty clear that it’s a pretty good deal now. There’S also, of course, lots of little things that didn’t quite fit into those pillars like the slightly better haptics of the flagship, for example, you might be really into that or the bigger speakers that come from having a bigger phone that do sound better uh. Also, there’s a stylus in the big one uh. Also, if you want decks, you’d have to pay up, because the a54 doesn’t have that funny thing. Is they both have the exact same unboxing experience, which is just the phone no charger but yeah these mid-rangers today masterfully mitigate the law of diminishing returns. Matching the flagship’s Finesse for a fraction of the funds thanks for watching catch you guys in the next one peace .