Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra review

Portraits

Portraits with the Galaxy S20 Ultra are a relatively complex topic. For starters, the go-to mode for taking pictures of people with blurred backgrounds is Live focus. As has been the case on recent Samsung high-end models, on the Ultra you have two different coverage options designated in a familiar tree fashion. On the Note10 and S10, those meant two trees for the main cam and one tree for the telephoto cam, with the other module pitching in for providing depth data.

It's not quite so on the Ultra. In both Live focus magnifications, the phone captures the image with the main camera, while the depth estimation comes from the ToF camera. The zoomed-in view matches a 2x coverage. What that means for purposes practical is that the wide mode a) gets you too close to your subject, generally making the shooting process uncomfortable, and b) captures photos with distorted facial proportions due to the wide-angle lens' perspective.

Live focus samples, wide mode

As for the zoomed-in mode - you get less sharp photos because the phone needs to crop from the main camera to capture the 2x equivalent and then upscale to 12MP. Weirdly enough, dynamic range is better in this mode.

Live focus samples, crop mode

There's another 'portrait' mode of sorts. That's simply using the photo mode at 4x zoom. The 103mm equivalent focal length is a close match for the 105mm lenses a lot of pros swear by for portraiture. On the Ultra, with proper spacing between subject and background, you can get some decently blurry backgrounds with perfect subject isolation - it's all optics and zero algorithms. One issue is that it's hard to get your mug in the frame that way, even with a selfie stick.

'Portraits', 4x zoom

Live focus mode can also be applied on non-human subjects with much the same success and caveats.

Live focus samples, non-human subjects, wide mode

Live focus samples, non-human subjects, crop mode

Selfies

Once you've reached peace with Samsung's selfie camera coverage policies, you'll enjoy some very good selfies. The resulting 10MP of detail are plenty, colors are nice and dynamic range is excellent.

Selfie samples, wide mode, 10MP

Here's how these shots would look if the Galaxy would have its way with cropping.

Selfie samples, crop mode, 6.5MP

Live focus mode is not infallible and will occasionally leave in focus small portions of the background alongside the border with the subject, or blur out some clothes in the bordering regions. Overall though, as single-camera selfie portraits go, the ones out of the S20 Ultra are easily among the better ones.

Selfie samples, live focus

The selfie camera can be set to capture photos in the nominal 40MP resolution of the sensor. You do stand to gain some finer detail in good lighting, particularly in diagonally aligned wrinkles under your eyes. We'd stick to 10MP, but if you're in a pre-wrinkle state, you may go for 40MP.

Selfie samples, wide mode, 10MP

There's a new selfie tone setting on the Galaxy S20 Ultra. It lets you tweak the color reproduction in single steps towards warm or cool, and the effect is very subtle but it's there. We're still liking the default rendition best, because it has a bit more contrast, the 'best' tone of pink, and the least amount of skin smoothening. Plus, we're not huge fans of redundant settings in the first place. Still, the option is there for you to explore.

Selfie tone: Original • Warm • Cool

Autofocus and skin tone issues

We ran into a couple of unexpected issues when it came to taking pictures of people with the rear cam in Photo mode. Or perhaps the same underlining problem but manifesting itself in different ways. One is an aggressive skin brightening and smoothing, which wipes away all semblance of humanity out of your subject (the first sample below) or in less extreme cases makes for an unnatural skin tone - that's with the skin corrections disabled to the best of our ability as users.

People issues #1

You'll also notice that neither of the above photos is sharp, which is, in fact, systematically the case with our people shots. In the sequence below, only the third and sixth photos are tack sharp. It shouldn't be an issue with focus, because you could see in the viewfinder that's it's found a face, and you could see it pulling focus onto it. And we made sure our model stood still, and we gave it our best to avoid camera shake each time.

People issues #2