Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra review

11 February 2023


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  • KunwarPahuja
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  • 12 Feb 2023

Will there be a S23 FE or S22 FE?
S21 FE wasn't really great.

    • ?
    • Anonymous
    • Lkg
    • 12 Feb 2023

    Anonymous, 12 Feb 2023"but a 10-bit panel with its 1 billion color gradation... moreMine has 120Hz. I turned it off.
    Was not any worth.

      You can tell just how bad the previous Exynos 2200 SoC is when the new phone scored an extra 18 hours of battery endurance rating. That is a hugely significant improvement. Even having AMD on board for the GPU performance doesn't do enough justice for the Exynos.

      As for the 200MP primary camera, I am not a big fan of the overall photo quality. That is an iPhone-grade oversharpening level right there. Heck, the iPhone 14 Pro/Pro Max shows much better photo quality when shoot at 48MP and then downscaled to 12MP. It's the same story when I compared this phone against the 2021 Sony Xperia Pro-I using the Photo Compare tool. The oversharpening effect from this phone's 200MP camera is totally off the scale!

        Very interesting about the 126 hr battery rating . So it seems the Gen 2 chip is much more energy efficient. These premium Android makers that are promising 5 years of support are endangering their long term demand. With Oppo ,Samsung and now Oneplus ,consumers can wait till Black Friday and beyond to bag a new handset with significant discount and the nearly new sector on Ebay etc will become evermore tempting. Especially as Oppo and Oneplus are guaranteeing no battery degradation for 1600 charges.

          • F
          • Frank
          • gDf
          • 12 Feb 2023

          Hello GSM-ARENA-TEAM!

          First, a big THANK YOU for all your smartphone-reviews over the past years. They are an extremely useful orientation for users and those interested in buying a new phone - in particular the pictures within the camera-reviews!

          Are you aware YOU DO SOMETHING UNIQUE HERE noone else does, at least not as regularly as you?

          Certain scenes are most oftenly captured "by default" with every phone and every single camera of a phone you review, each time (or nearly so) from the same perspective and in comparable lighting: the castle with mural and clock, the snail left of Park-Hotel-Vitosha-entrance and it's surrounding, the view from the park towards Baku with Vitosha-Hall and Park-Hotel-Vitosha.
          The same applies for certain nighttime-scenes.

          This provides AN INVALUABLE OPPORTUNITY TO COMPARE PICTURES not only across different cameras of one phone but ACROSS CAMERAS OF DIFFERENT PHONES over time!

          Within certain limitations one can easily compare the fully downloaded pictures, e. g. regarding general 'look and feel', detail, contrast, sharpness, colour-reproduction, noise-level .... even across different devices! I.m.h.o. for the interested reader that can be at least as useful as your photo-compare-tool! Even more so as the development and quality of smartphone-cameras have been and still are advancing rapidly.

          UNFORTUNATELY these scenes are almost completely missing in the current Galaxy- S23-Ultra-review, just as much as in former reviews of some top-end-devices, e. g. the Pixel 7 Pro.

          Maybe over time it's boring for reviewers to capture the same scene again and again ... but it's precious for the people you do it for!

          PLEASE keep capturing these scenes for your reviews on a regular base! And perhaps add them to your current S23-reviews or the coresponding future longterm-reviews?

          Have a great time

          Frank




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            • Anonymous
            • Lkg
            • 12 Feb 2023

            Nick Tegrataker, 12 Feb 2023This is one of the highest-rated phones on GSMArena, and de... moreSince when samsung has well calibrated screen?
            They did not even bother to show values.
            Phone Arena got delta 2.64 rgbcmy and 7.8 grayscale.
            The same Phone Arena got 1.3 and 2.5 from S22u.
            Panel is exactly same , but bad calibrated. And being same includes 232Hz pwm.

            Not even playing with rgb sliders get rid of warm colours.

              • m
              • mm
              • DGV
              • 12 Feb 2023

              Tanji, 12 Feb 2023Wow! 30 mins of downtime? Thats one heck of BS.arstechnica has the article among others

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                • Anonymous
                • mQM
                • 12 Feb 2023

                MY NEXT PHONE :) Time to replace my aging S21+ once the green color becomes available. For real there's only pink 512GB available right now wtf

                  Artem S. Tashkinov, 12 Feb 202350MP photos from S23 Ultra are jaw dropping. I've neve... moreThey are impressive, but not the best. Have S23 Ultra from yesterday, and to be honest, RAWs from my GFs iPhone 14 PRO are better. More flexible, more DR, less processed. For having 50 Mpix pictures here is something good, better than only 12 on S22 Ultra, but Samsung still has so much work ahead. I was hoping for more here, that maybe ok JPGs will be overprocessed like Samsung always does (and this time they overprocess them BIG TIME), but at least RAWs will be better this time, but unfortunately no. :(

                    dd, 11 Feb 2023Bloatware pushes the Galaxy S23 Android OS to an incredible... moreWow! 30 mins of downtime? Thats one heck of BS.

                      • ?
                      • Anonymous
                      • 7vX
                      • 12 Feb 2023

                      jiyen235, 12 Feb 2023Let's see, NO improvement in brightness, Samsung thems... moreI agree. In the S7 series, even the base s7 felt like a proper flagship despite being the vanilla model. It slowly went away from that. The Ultras dont even feel like Ultras, they feel like the "+" version. The Full HD+ displays, not to mention 8-bit(some midrangers offer 10-bit displays now), 8GB/256GB for such price, essentially same cameras, 65W should be the minimum charging speed for the price customers pay from them. Lots of things that make it so unworth it. Overall, the S23 lineup is really solid but the price is too hard to swallow for what they offer.

                        Let's see, NO improvement in brightness, Samsung themselves make displays for Apple yet they get displays with higher brightness? Still stuck at 8 bit samsung?? why? Xiaomi, Vivo and Oppo are providing 10 bit displays for a while now. Charging in Samsung phones have been stagnant for a while now. I'm not saying this is slow but why not bring this up as a problem? Stagnation is not something that is to be supported. I'll agree, the improvements in speaker, battery and performance are great. However that is to be expected, the S22 Ultra had a bit of a disappointing battery, the SD 8 Gen 1 was way too hot and not that powerful and the speakers were pretty disappointing. One thing that is impressive is the video, I'll give them that. The camera's photos are a tad bit overprocessed. They were going in the right direction with the s21 ultra and making stuff look more natural, then they just did a complete 180. Also, Samsung still hasn't been able to fix the coarse noise in its photos. I'm not saying they should get rid of noise but the ones in their photos are especially ugly. Take one photo with Gcam and you can see that samsung's noise is much uglier for no reason even though the stock camera app takes much longer to process and has a higher shutter lag. There's also no changes to the other three lens. The 10x is unusable in extreme lowlight and the 3x is inferior to the competition. Their title as "king of zoom" is just something that they're able to keep because everyone else knows no one needs this, at least at the quality Samsung provides. Once again, Gcam improves the quality of the 3x and 10x and makes this truly the zoom king. Even when Samsung has the hardware they somehow mess up with their software lmao

                        Samsung jacked up the prices and still gives an 8gb ram on its base model and no 16gb ram option. Why cheap out on the "Ultra" model? This is supposed to be the cream of the crop. The cost and the shortcomings makes me think that Samsung doesn't care much anymore/they don't respect their customers much. Back then Samsung truly had the best displays and best specs, they don't have that now. The increased prices are just like salt in the wound. The reviewer is way too happy about a product that has shortcomings like this that just don't make me truly think that this is an Ultra phone. Samsung made its Base S series phones much worse to make this look better, that doesn't mean this is the best it's just that they suck a lot more than they should, for their price that is.

                          50MP photos from S23 Ultra are jaw dropping. I've never expected anything like that. They are extremely detailed, and near perfect. You can crop them and get exactly what you want.

                          I wanna hope in 3-5 years we'll get mid-range phones with this image quality. It's just insane.

                          People are complaining about colors and I don't understand it. You can correct colors in post production in a few touches/mouse clicks but you won't ever be able to get extra clarity. Too bad I cannot afford it.

                          Photography-wise this phone is perfect.

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                            • Anonymous
                            • QKD
                            • 12 Feb 2023

                            Wow no cons. That hasn't happened in a review in at least half a decade

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                              • Dukemb
                              • 0VU
                              • 12 Feb 2023

                              I think the editors had a better piece with a better quality lens on the main camera. Mine has similarly blurred edges as it was with the S22 Ultra. especially the right edge is a tragedy. In the editorial test, it's really sharp right up to the corner...

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                                • Inedian
                                • L2r
                                • 12 Feb 2023

                                Anonymous, 12 Feb 2023This is the highest rated phone by gsmarena ever..Samsung Galaxy Note 8 is higher with 4.8, Note 9 and Note 10 are at 4.7.

                                  Anonymous, 11 Feb 2023" We're getting more vivid colors overall with a ... moreThat would not even have been a problem if Samsung just kept improving its "pop" type of processing but also supplied us with a setting for more natural looking processing. Like the Leica Vibrant and Leica Authentic in Xiaomi or the Zeiss Natural colors in Vivo. Come on Samsung do something

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                                    • Anonymous
                                    • XMr
                                    • 12 Feb 2023

                                    AcademicBarzo, 12 Feb 2023Good review, but yet another which fails to adresss the poo... morewait.... and how many user use that? 0.001% ? And how many phone offer that ? 0

                                      Aierlan, 12 Feb 2023Tried the Leica Authentic mode on numerous Xiaomi phones an... moreXiaomi's camera app has several filter options that you can apply to the image along with the Leica Authentic/Vibrant mode - From what I have seen, the combination of Authentic + Leica NAT yields fairly neutral (Notice that I said "neutral" in my previous comment too, which is not necessarily the same as "natural") colours while keeping the contrast at bay. With that said, 12S Ultra isn't available in my country, so once the Xiaomi 13 series comes I can get my hands on it in a retail shop to see how it actually performs in detail.

                                        Nick Tegrataker, 12 Feb 2023I will say this in defence of Samsung - Having a tendency t... moreTried the Leica Authentic mode on numerous Xiaomi phones and I don't really think it aims to produce natural colours. For example blue jeans tend to turn to black indoors at least. I think it's more designed to produce heavy contrast photos in a Leica style rather than close to natural colours. Sites like notebookcheck also measure strong colour deviations especially for greens against a test chart even in Leica Authentic mode. However, Xiaomi's approach to sharpening is good on the Xiaomi 12s ultra and Xiaomi 11 ultra. They are less aggressive than many flagships in sharpening

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