Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “The Galaxy S21 Ultra is Better than you think.”.
Right, let’s get one thing out the way: the galaxy s21 and the galaxy s21 plus were fine they’re. Two phones that i could pretty much summarize just by saying new chip, new look, and so, while that doesn’t make them bad phones, i actually appreciate how samsung made them cheaper than last year’s. It does mean that it’s just kind of hard to get excited about them, but the galaxy s21 ultra is different. It’S actually interesting that they ended up going for the name s21 just because after they moved all the way from 10 to 20 last year, moving from 20 to 21 now makes this sound, really inconsequential, but long term.
I think the fact that the name of the phones now matches the year we are in will probably help a lot of consumers just keep track of which ones which, and it might even help. Samsung pop up in a few more search results. Anyways, let’s get into it, and this video was actually sponsored by huel, which is a really fun story that i will tell you at the end, the unboxing experience is uh. This trend of removing the charges has caught on a lot quicker than i was expecting, but while it is a shame you know, while this is the pinnacle of samsung’s lineup yep we’re getting less in the box than we’ve ever had. On the other hand, they are kind of passing that saving onto the consumer, like this phone, is something like 50 pounds in the uk or 200 in the u.s cheaper than last year’s kind of makes up for it. If we open it up, you’ve got the phone on top, you get an insert which has a cable and some other manuals, and that is literally it. We don’t even get a case here right.
Here’S what you came for, though this is an even better phone than it looks like i haven’t, had it long enough for a full review, but i’ve had it long enough to say that samsung has fixed almost every problem with the galaxy s20 ultra there’s just one Thing you’ve got to look out for, like the design of this phone is two steps above last year’s. Admittedly, that’s not saying a huge amount, given that its predecessor was a literal grey monolith, but this whole camera module being integrated into the body of the phone idea. I think it works either way you are gon na get a bump, but this changes the rhetoric from. Ah, would you look at that? We’Ve got too many lenses. How do we try and hide them? Hey. We’Ve got a lot of cameras on our phone and we’re proud of it.
They’Re part of our design. Now don’t get me wrong. This phone is thick and i say that with 5cs, but it’s still definitely the nicer phone to hold. It addresses the stickiness of the s20, with this frosted matte finish, and you don’t have to worry about the jaby corners from the note 20, because this is an s phone and there’s also an additional peace of mind element, because this entire thing is a gorilla glass. Victus sandwich, meaning that both the front and the back are something like 80 more resistant to scratches and coming from something like an iphone 12 pro max, which is a phone. That’S taken sharp sides to its literal extreme. This is how i would rather my phone felt. Yes, it would have been nice to see some more exciting color options and, yes, the cameras do come down a little further than last year’s, which means that every now and again your fingers do bump against it.
But as far as i’m concerned design, they fixed it. Even the screen is leveled up and i’m gon na try and show you how so take this. This is the galaxy s10 plus from 2019, and this phone screen was so good that even compared to most laptop screens and monitors that you find in 2021. This is still what i would call an a-grade display, and so you can probably imagine that the s20 ultra from the year after is not just good but amazing. Still, it’s bigger. It’S way more responsive at 120 hertz instead of 60 and his color accuracy is officially rated as visually indistinguishable from perfect. So when i tell you that, with this phone they’ve taken that, given it 25 more nits of brightness 50, better contrast and allowed it to run at not just 120 hertz, but also quad, hd plus resolution, you can probably imagine how good a screen it is. I do still wish they managed to get rid of this little chin left at the bottom, because it seems like they’ve managed to do that on the standard s21, but yeah if you’re, someone who hasn’t upgraded phones recently and you’re coming from like a 2017 model, i Would pay to see your reaction to this, but there’s more samsung have done the unthinkable and added s pen functionality, which is something that up until this point has been exclusive to the galaxy note brand of phones. Now it isn’t something that i’m going to use like. It’S not just that you’ve got to drop 70 on a case, but it’s a case that looks like this and you’re still not getting the full s. Pen features, but we can’t complain about just having another option and this new s pen does at least look well a bit more. Like an actual pen, they’ve made the ram and storage faster they’ve used a new generation of fingerprint scanner.
That’S 1.7 times larger they’ve improved the chipsets. You might remember the absolute fiasco. That was the exynos chips last year. Effectively.
If you were buying a samsung flagship in either india or the uk, you were getting a phone that not just ran hotter but had up to 20 worse battery life and performance than if you were in the us, and you got a snapdragon phone. But this time round, samsung’s claiming they fixed that disparity this new exynos 2100 and this generation of phones has apparently caught up. Maybe because, in my video briefing for this phone i was told that the graphics were 35. Better fine, that’s great, but when i asked later over email they said it was 33 faster and then, when i watched the launch event of the chip itself, they said there it was more than 40 faster. We will dig into this. I’Ve got a full video planned. Comparing the exynos and the snapdragon versions of this phone, so if you do want to see that then a sub to the channel would be ultra, i think that works, but don’t forget just having a next-gen chip in this phone. Whatever the region means a whole load of other quality of life, improvements like better 5g, better battery efficiency, bluetooth 5.2, which is effectively just more stable bluetooth, and it might also make your earphone sound better.
You get a faster camera shutter time you get quicker, uploading, all that good stuff and even wi-fi 6e, which can raise the average speed of your wi-fi quite dramatically. If you have the right router but, most importantly, i think they’ve got the cameras right. So, with the s20 ultra last year, they loaded it up. They jumped from a 12 megapixel sensor to 108. They went from 10 times max, zoom to 100 times space zoom, and they went from 4k to 8k video recording. But i think the focus was so much on just getting those numbers in there that, in terms of how it actually delivered on those numbers, it was kind of lacking this 108 megapixel sensor.
It was detailed, but when it launched actually suffered worse dynamic range than even the normal galaxy s20, not to mention it just had a really tough time focusing on things which is a a pretty fundamental part of the camera experience and the 100 time space zoom was Cool, but beyond about 10 times it just wasn’t really good enough to use anywhere so samsung refined it. The galaxy note, 20 ultra that came a few months later, had much better dynamic range thanks to improved software. It completely fixed the focusing issue with the introduction of a laser autofocus module and they created a zoom system that you could actually use even at 20 times so with the s phone. They push forward with the note phone they consolidated, and so i’m glad to see that with a new s, phone they’ve pushed forward again and they’re. Now not just doing it in a way that feels like throwing out a load of big numbers. The numbers haven’t even changed.
This is still a 108 megapixel camera. It’S still got 100 times zoom. It still records 8k video. But there are three big improvements here.
The first one is obvious: it’s zoom, while the s20 ultra had just one four times: optical zoom camera. This phone has both a three times: optical zoom and a ten times optical zoom, and just this in itself has three benefits. It means that a you can take a good photo at just about every point between one times and ten times like this is three times this is five times. This is eight times.
It means that b, the upper limit of the zoom is higher. How far you can go while still getting a sharp shot like you can now actually take a 100 times zoom photo that is usable. Admittedly, it needs to be an absolute best case scenario, but at 30 times you can get an almost always sharp result and c is video. You see the way that the last camera worked is that after you zoomed in four times every extra bit of zoom beyond that point is digital zoom.
But if you use digital zoom in video, it very quickly falls apart. So the most zoomed video you could really take was at four times, but on this camera you can take 4k video at 60 frames per second at 10 times magnification. You can also now lock the zoom. So you know when you get to these crazy zoom levels like 30 times.
I already mentioned that you’ll be using a lot of digital zoom, which is effectively just taking a frame and cropping into it, and the one upside of doing this is that when you’re zoomed in your phone can actually see a lot more than what you can see And so, as you move your phone up, for example, as your hand shakes that crop can just come down so that your subject remains still all that said, though, how important is zoom like? Is it just one of those things? That’S really easy to sell to people because you can be like well at 100 times magnification. Our photos look so much better than the competition, so our cameras are so much better than the competition to be fair. When i was on the s20 ultra, i did use the zoom a fair bit, but at the same time i can’t think of a single point when i used it, because i actually needed to see something really far away. It was almost always just the same way. You use a toy like. Ah i’m curious, what can it do in this situation? Type thing – and i did say this in one of my videos about the phone, but there’s so many comments of people like rubbish. I’Ve seen what that phone can do. It’S way more than a toy, but then i realized that a lot of them had actually come from this video, which is actually a fake video. If this was what the phone could actually do, then i would say yes fair enough, that is mad, but it isn’t anyways though zoom aside, the second big upgrade is the sensor. While the old one used samsung’s hm1 sensor, this one uses samsung’s hm3.
The way it was described to me is that this will capture 64 times, richer, color and three times wider dynamic range. But i would just be a little careful about that, because what that’s actually referring to is the fact that this can shoot 12-bit raw images and as cool as that is most people won’t be doing that, but what it will mean for just about every normal photo. You take is still noticeably better dynamic range and still a pretty drastic improvement in low light, and who knows, i might find more improvements, as i start to test it more in depth. Now.
The third camera upgrade is the most interesting see this phone technically has four cameras right. It’S a quad camera setup, but it’s actually kind of five. What they’ve done is added dual pixel autofocus to the ultra wide camera, and so, when you get really close to subjects it can detect where they are and turn itself into a macro camera.
I did see a fair few people online saying that they were surprised that samsung didn’t add some sort of fifth camera to fill this space, but they kind of did have a fifth camera and by being a two in one, it’s not just that you’re getting a Free macro camera: it’s that you’re getting a better macro camera, because it’s true most of them suck with most macro cameras, you’re getting like a 2 megapixel or like a 5 megapixel throwaway lens. But with this it’s 12., this ultrawide camera and therefore this macro camera has the same sensor as the main camera of the galaxy note 10., so providing you’re in decent light. It’S an impressive result. There’S a couple of other new software features like vlogger view, which lets you record both the front and the back. At the same time, others have had this for kind of a while, but it’s good to finally see it and director’s view which lets you preview.
All three different lenses at once. I can kind of see the use, but it’s pretty niche right. So i mentioned earlier that there was one thing that you should probably watch out for with this phone and that’s the fact that samsung has silently dropped, microsd card support, which means that compared to the frankly ridiculous 1.5 terabytes that the s20 ultra could store, which is One of those things that really made us go whoa, that is ultra the new phone, goes up to a much more normal 512 gigabytes, and this is particularly worth bearing in mind, because samsung is marketing this as the multimedia machine, the phone to record 4k video at 60 frames per second on the phone to record 8k video on. Do you want to know how much 8k video you can actually fit on the base version of this phone three hours? Three hours of 8k video, even at just 24 fps, will completely fill every bit of storage.
You’Ve got and that’s assuming you’ve got no apps, no music and zero photos, but i do have to say: samsung has really covered themselves with this phone like for pretty much. Every single hole you could potentially poke at it. There is a justification like for expandable storage. Not only has pretty much every competitor also ditched their support for it, but samsung has specifically tried to make up for it by making sure that their 256 gig model, which is twice the base storage, only costs 50 more. While most companies will make this option cost an extra hundred, you could say ah samsung you’re, so cheap you, you got rid of the akg earphones in the box. I really wanted those, but at the same time, they’re giving away free galaxy buds pro to people who pre-order it and those are like 10 times the value you could even say. I saw this on twitter charging speed the charging speed of the phone sucks 25 watts. What year is this like 1976, but what they have done is optimized how fast the phone charges with just 25 watts of power and, at the same time, they’ve half the price that they’re selling those 25 watt bricks for so hang on for those detailed comparisons. But so far, i’m very happy.
Okay, this is hugh and you might be able to tell i’ve never been this excited about a sponsorship, because i’ve actually been drinking heal for four years before the company reached out to me. I think they spotted me wearing a huel t-shirt in some sort of past review and they were just like hey. Do you want to talk about us in an actual video? Yes, yes, i do so when you buy huel you’re, basically buying an entire meal in powder form, you get a free shaker with it and to make it, you literally just add water and shake, and it’s actually built so that you don’t even need to pour it Into anything you drink it from the shaker, it’s healthy, like almost the entire ingredients list, is just oats, peas, coconuts and grains. It’S got a ton of protein, it’s got literally every vitamin it tastes. Surprisingly, good, and actually the one i’ve switched to recently is the new black edition, which is the exact same concept, but with 33 more protein and 50 percent less carbs, so give it a try. I’Ve left a special link in the description and, if you click that link, it will really help to support this channel and if you order you’ll, actually get not just the powder and the shaker but um. Let’S say one of these uh extremely well fitting huel t-shirts that doesn’t tempt you, then what will thank you so much for watching. My name is aaron. This is mr who’s, the boss and i’ll catch you in the next one.
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