Samsung Galaxy S20 Series Hands On: These Babies Got Back And Whole Lotta Zoom

We got our hands on the Samsung Galaxy S20, S20+ and S20 Ultra and we pitted the 108MP camera on S20 Ultra against the medium format camera. Results? You gotta see it for yourself.

Let’s talk about the S20 and S20+ first, these are all flagship devices. Depending on your country, the phone could come with either a Snapdragon 865 or Exynos 990 processor.

The phones both have a 64MP telephoto, 12MP wide and 12MP ultrawide. The S20 has a smaller screen at 6.2″ while the S20+ has a 6.7″ screen, but both have a 120Hz refresh rate and use a WQHD+ display when not in 120Hz refresh rate mode. Only FHD+ is available if you use the 120Hz refresh rate.

The waterfall display is essentially gone with the S20 series, since Samsung has decided to go with a flatter screen here. That means you have more screen real estate to highlight text, edit photos and such.

The front-facing camera is a single punch-hole so it’s symmetrical, and the phone is almost bezel-less with just a slight black edge around the sides.

In terms of battery, the S20 has the smallest at 4,000mAh, while the S20+ has a 4,500mAh battery pack that’s more in line with other flagship phones.

The S20 is a great choice for people looking for a smaller phone that doesn’t compromise on photo quality. Despite lacking the crazy zoom abilities of the S20+ and Ultra, it still puts out very decent photos for the most part.

With 10MP front-facing cameras for the S20 and S20+, the selfies out of these phones are pretty good, but we’d recommend turning off beauty mode to avoid that typical skin-softening effect.

The S20+ has all the same specs as the S20 but has optical zoom of 3x and digital zoom of 30x, called Space Zoom. There’s also 8K video recording on these devices.

Let’s move on to the S20 Ultra. People said Samsung was holding back on their devices, but now they’ve brought it all out. With a 108MP wide camera, 12MP ultrawide and 48MP telephoto, the camera specs are already impressive.

The screen is a 6.9″ WQHD+ Infinity Display with a 120Hz refresh rate and leads the pack in terms of battery life with a whopping 5,000mAh battery. It’s also 5G capable, and definitely future-proof for the next two to three years.

When we heard this has a 108MP camera, we decided to pit it against the 102MP Fujifilm GFX100 that we were reviewing. Of course, the medium format camera is going to win, but it only served to highlight how impressive the camera on the S20 Ultra is.

If you thought the 30x Space Zoom on the S20+ was impressive, you’ll be blown away by the 100x Space Zoom on the S20 Ultra. When you’re actually using it, you’ll get a lot of camera shake but it’s amazing what Samsung has done with this technology.

Another really cool feature is the Single Take function in the camera app. Instead of having to manually choose between portrait, wide, ultrawide and more, the camera takes a photo using each setting so the user can pick the nicest out of the lot.

It takes the guesswork out of capturing a photo and we think this is a great feature that should come to more devices in the future. The S20 series has definitely been refined, and we really like what Samsung has done with these phones.