Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra review

11 February 2023


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  • 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.

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          • 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

                              Good review, but yet another which fails to adresss the poor Bluetooth implementation that Samsung is getting away with in their supposedly flagship phones. Despite all the marketing hype around a modified Qualcomm chipset, there is still no sign on Snapdragon sound or apt-x adaptive on the Galaxy phones. This is unacceptable in 2023 - many headphones (B&O, Sennheiser, Bowers & Wilkins, Focal, etc) use aptx-apdative instead of LDAC in their codec support, and the Galaxy series does not support this. I wish reviews would at least comment on this, given that the phones no longer have a headphone jack.

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                                • Anonymous
                                • YQZ
                                • 12 Feb 2023

                                "but a 10-bit panel with its 1 billion color gradations will be better at displaying smooth color gradients without introducing banding"

                                How about you guys reviewing these flagships design a test where you display a gradient or color swatch and test how smooth the 10 bit displays are? I am sure you guys were claiming about how good 120hz is even when the readers won't be able to experience the difference from the review.

                                  All these so called modern cameraphone bragging about numbers, tdchnology, advanced software and hardware with a $1000+ price tag and coould not capture a natural looking picture with true to life colours specially the sky , most of them portarits the sky like a blue tarpoline.

                                    unxpctd, 12 Feb 2023I'm not impressed with this phone at all. Samsung is n... moreThey've improved the chip, the battery life and the camera... what more do you want? The S22U was already pretty perfect.

                                    And actually, no - Samsung don't use this design on their cheaper models... it's only for the Ultra.

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                                      • Johnny Romania
                                      • ajW
                                      • 12 Feb 2023

                                      Wow first comment on the S23 Ultra's page. And I really took my time to read the review and eat :)) so I could have been even way quicker.

                                      This phone was so expected with it's 200 MP sensor (wich ar first I was 100% sure will be a big fuss, but after I started to see every reviewer become so excited, I kind of started too :))). WHAT A DISSAPPONTMENT. Good thing they all come with SD 8 Gen 2, but except for this, there is absolutely nothing exciting, NOTHING.

                                      5 minutes faster charging and 1 hour better battery life ? For real ? :)) And don't get me started with this whole reviewer battery screen on time shit in very specific use cases like leaving the phone to play video on youtube for 8 hours and doing nothing else.

                                      If I take the s23 ultra for a ride on mobile data with 1 hour live location Google Maps, 1 hour Google Chrome jumping from page to page to page to page, 1 hour of Flashscore jumping from game to game to game to game too see stats and H2H, and texting on whatsapp in between all these actions. Your phone is gone whichever one it may be.

                                        Anonymous, 11 Feb 2023" We're getting more vivid colors overall with a ... moreI will say this in defence of Samsung - Having a tendency to skew and saturate specific colours isn't "offense to the act of photography", that's just the photographic style that Samsung decided to go with. It's like how Canon is known for vibrant SOOC JPEGs and Fuji is for subdued colours with a lot of hue shifts that resemble what film cameras capture.

                                        Although I must also mention that it's a bit disappointing that Samsung still doesn't have a comparable colour reproduction mode to Vivo's Zeiss Natural Colour or Xiaomi's Leica Authentic mode, both of which allow for more neutral-looking colours with a lot more nuance and the leeway to tune them afterwards. Not to mention, sharpening on the S23 series is still cranked up way too high for the 12.5MP mode in good light.

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