Samsung Galaxy A54 long-term review

Colors

The A54's screen is probably the best thing about it, and by some margin. The battery life is the other best thing, but we'll get to that in due course. For now, let's commend Samsung for not skimping on screen quality here. The panel you get in the A54 may not be high-end, but it's great and incredibly accurate.

Screen mode settings

Samsung also has, in our opinion, the best color settings on the market. You get Natural which is perfectly tuned to the sRGB color space, and Vivid, which is very well tuned to DCI-P3 but gets even better if you select the warmest tone. You can also play with individual red, green, and blue levels if you want to. Those are all the settings you need, and thus they are all the settings you get. No convoluted messes here (hear that, Xiaomi?).

Brightness

Now, when it comes to brightness, the A54 plays in that mid-range field of 'about 1,000 nits' on the top end. It's not record breaking by any means, not even for its price, but it's where we'd say the minimum would be for most people to consider a panel viewable in all lighting conditions, even on a bright sunny day. It won't be as easy to read in such conditions as those that go higher, but it will be legible, and at this price point, it's important to hit that note. It's also 150 nits brighter than its predecessor was, which is significant and will definitely be obviously visible side-by-side.

At the lowest end of the brightness scale, the A54, like most smartphones these days, doesn't really get dim enough for comfort in our book, especially if you view a lot of stuff with white backgrounds in pitch dark environments. Thankfully, however, that doesn't matter, because unlike other companies (cough, Xiaomi, cough), Samsung has implemented the Extra dim feature which does exactly what the name implies. It has a slider of its own, and it will make the screen dimmer than it is on its dimmest brightness setting.

We have no idea why Google had to come up with this solution to the obvious fact of screens getting brighter at their dimmest in recent times, but we're happy it did. We still think Extra dim would make most sense integrated with the brightness slider, and not as a completely separate feature, but it's better to have it than not.

Display settings

The auto brightness algorithm on the A54 is great. It's not the best we've recently tested, but it's definitely very much above average. Manual tuning was still required for the first two weeks or so of our use, but after that we barely touched the brightness slider, and that's how we think it should be. The algorithm is better than a lot we've seen in much more expensive phones, so while we are always striving for perfection, given the market conditions in this regard at the moment, we were very happy with it.

Refresh rate

The A54 has a 120 Hz maximum refresh rate, and you should definitely use the Adaptive setting in Motion smoothness, which is what takes it there. That said, don't expect this 120 Hz to feel like other 120 Hz refresh rate modes on other phones. There's so much choppiness and lag throughout the UI, and the chipset seems to struggle with even basic scrolling in some apps, that this is not going to be a smooth experience.

Motion smoothness settings

It will, however, be smoother than if you had picked the Standard mode, so there's that. We'll talk more about smoothness (or lack thereof) in the dedicated section of this review, don't worry. As always, we only ever used the top refresh rate setting, since battery life was great anyway and there's absolutely no other reason to go lower.

Always On Display, Eye comfort shield

One UI's Always On Display is very customizable in how it shows up - upon a tap, always, on a schedule, or for new notifications only. It might in fact be the most customizable out there in this regard. When it comes to what's displayed on it, it's less so - you get music playback info, notification icons, and a few clock styles to pick from, as well as the possibility to use stickers, AR Emoji, Bitmoji, or an image from your Gallery, but that's it.

Always On Display settings

There are more comprehensive options out there in other skins, but unless you've used one of those, we don't think you'll feel like anything's missing. The fact that the AOD can use the auto brightness algorithm to adapt itself to the ambient light levels is great, though we're not entirely sure why anyone would turn this off (it's on by default, as it should be). Anyway, if you want to, you can - "if you want to, you can" could very well be One UI's slogan, by the way.

Eye comfort shield settings

The blue light filter is called Eye comfort shield and it can automatically adapt the screen's colors based on the time of day - with minor adjustments during daytime and significantly warmer colors at night. That's a neat trick, but otherwise it's pretty basic, with a color temperature slider and the possibility to schedule it either to come on at sunset and off at sunrise, or with a custom interval. It gets the job done, undoubtedly, but could perhaps be a little more customizable, since customizability is such a big theme in One UI.

Biometrics

The A54 has an in-display fingerprint scanner, and on paper that's great, right? Most of its competitors come with side-mounted ones, and Samsung S-series devices have recently had by far the best in-display sensors ever made. So this one should be amazing too? Well, no.

It's not ultrasonic, like in the flagship line. It's optical, which in itself is no problem - we've handled plenty of great optical scanners in the past few years. They're not quite on the level of ultrasonic ones, but can get very close.

This is not one of those. Don't get us wrong, it's fine. It's just not great, or outstanding, or amazing. It works, but it's slower than most sensors we've used in the past year or so, and accuracy, while not bad, is nowhere near the top tier. We managed to get in upon the first try in about 90-92% of cases, which sounds high but isn't. 95% would be great, 97-99% is outstanding aka perfect in our book, especially for an in-display sensor, and while the ultrasonic ones in the S series are there, this one isn't.

Biometrics settings

There's nothing wrong with it, though, it's just pretty clear that it's a cheaper part that wasn't given a lot of priority when building this phone's bill of materials. Clearly, Samsung thought the A54 had to have an in-display sensor, perhaps to make it feel more premium than its competitors with side-mounted ones, but then the company didn't go out and source a great one, skimping on what can't be more than a few dollars per unit.

Look, you can't maximize every part in every mid-range device, because then what you end up with isn't mid-range anymore. But the fingerprint scanner is something one interacts with dozens, if not hundreds of times each day, and skimping out on it doesn't make the whole user experience feel like you're getting more value than what you paid for. In some ways, it cheapens it to a lower point. That is, of course, if you use fingerprint authentication.

If not, you'll be more interested to know that there's face unlocking too, and it works, and it's not very fast either. It is marginally faster than using the fingerprint sensor, but we're not sure the 15-20% gain in unlocking time is worth the tradeoff in security, as this is the run of the mill kind which only uses the camera. There's a setting to not unlock if your eyes are closed, which is great, and we checked and it works as intended. That said, don't forget that such rudimentary face unlocking has been shown to be easily tricked with pictures or videos of the phone's owner.