Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra review: The AI phone that saves you time
- by Tom's Guide
- Jan 18, 2024
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Editor's Choice (Image credit: Future)
The 12MP ultrawide camera has the same 120-degree field of view, so it captures just as much of the scene as the Galaxy S23 Ultra. Meanwhile, the performance gains are almost non-existent in the photos I captured above — but they still turn out eye-catching in bright scenes.
I prefer how the S24 Ultra captures portrait shots because of the warmer looking composition with skin tones, along with its color saturation and how the background blur is intensified. By comparison, the S23 Ultra’s portrait mode shot appears muted.
Against the iPhone 15 Pro Max, it’s a tough call because I like the higher contrast look of the S24 Ultra’s portrait mode — but the iPhone is more realistic with its colors and blurring effect.
Macro mode on the Galaxy S24 Ultra has its purpose when I really want to get close to something, but I notice that while the subject is in focus when I tap on the screen, it tends to blur out the background and surrounding area. The effect makes it look stylish, but the iPhone 15 Pro Max retains more details around the other parts of the flower.
I was expecting better results from the Galaxy S24 Ultra under low light, but there are minor improvements nonetheless. For starters, the larger pixels in the sensor draws in more light — resulting in the photo of my detached garage being slightly brighter.
In this other high-contrast shot of my pear tree with twinkly lights on it, the S24 Ultra does better at retaining the details in the highlights — whereas the S23 Ultra tends to overexpose in those areas.
Against the iPhone 15 Pro Max under low light, it's a close call against the S24 Ultra, but the iPhone's brighter and warmer looking. The highlights are more defined with the iPhone, which I can tell from the light coming from the lamps in the shot above.
Now let's tackle the Galaxy S24 Ultra's long-range zooming, as that capability has often defined the Ultra phones. In the shots I captured at 5x zoom above, there are qualities that favor the Galaxy S24 Ultra — namely the overall brighter composition of the scene and its warmer color temperature.
But things get interesting as I move onto 10x zoom. The Galaxy S24 Ultra is leaning on that larger sensor of that 5x telephoto camera and new image processing to try and match the S23 Ultra’s 10x optical range.
The result? It’s close but the Galaxy S23 Ultra still pulls ahead with the details. For example, I see less of the texture around the white and red portions of the sign — while the brickwork from the building in the background appears sharper with the S23 Ultra.
I was skeptical that I might’ve tapped the wrong part of the S24 Ultra screen to set the camera's exposure and focus, so I took another set of snapshots of a nearby skyscraper above.
There’s clearly more detail with the S23 Ultra in the stonework near the spire of the building at 10x zoom, but it becomes more apparent when I switch them to their max 100x zoom range.
Galaxy S24 Ultra: Zoom test - YouTube
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With video recording, the S24 Ultra’s 5x telephoto camera puts up good results to match the amount of details captured by the S23 Ultra’s 10x optical telephoto cameras. You can see from the sign I recorded at 20x zoom, the fine lines of the wood grain appear similar in both footage.
Beyond the zooming performance, I wouldn't say there’s a tremendous difference with the videos I recorded at 4K 30fps. As a videographer, I plan on making the Galaxy S24 Ultra my backup video camera because of the strong video performance, utility of its zoom cameras, and manual controls that let me fine tune the settings to exactly what I like.
Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra review: AI photo & video features
(Image credit: Future)
Aside from the camera hardware, the S24 Ultra continues to offer features that cater to photo and video enthusiasts. In fact, Samsung's latest remains one of the few phones that can shoot 8K video; it also offers full manual controls with video. But the biggest software gains for the Galaxy S24 Ultra cameras relate to the innovative Galaxy AI editing tools at my disposal for editing photos.
These AI-assisted features make it feel like I have my own personal photo editor doing all the work in making my photos look more epic. And just like the other Galaxy AI features I’ve explained, the photo editing tools save me time. I’ve tested them out and here’s what I think about them.
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