Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra long-term review

Nighttime samples

At night, we left Auto Night Mode on, and when it triggered this resulted in exposure times of about 2 seconds for the main camera, something we think anyone can live with. Around 7 times out of 10 when leaving everything else in Auto, this Auto Night Mode would in fact trigger for the main snapper. The samples below are thus mainly employing Auto Night Mode, the app only forgoes that when you have ample lighting around you. So what you're seeing here are images captured in Auto mode, with Auto Night Mode kicking in when the phone thought it should.

Nighttime Auto samples from the main camera

Generally, these shots produce tons of sharpness, decent detail levels, low noise, saturated colors, reasonable highlight management, and even some shadow detail. If you turn Auto Night Mode off, you'll get worse images in almost every respect, which is why we think the 2 second waiting time is worth it.

If you 'force' the manual Night Mode, in some lighting conditions you'll get no difference compared to Auto Night Mode (presuming it did trigger). In others there will be a very slight further improvement in the handling of highlights, although at the expense of even more over-sharpening.

Night Mode samples from the main sensor

The ultrawide produces barely decent photos at night, far from outstanding or wow-inducing. If you still have some ambient lighting around, these can be usable in a pinch, but they do lack detail and have a lot of noise. Strangely enough, Auto Night Mode almost never intervenes in these shots, 9 times out of 10 it would just leave us with the Auto shot.

Nighttime Auto samples from the ultrawide

Thankfully though, manual Night Mode saves the day (or rather, night), getting rid of some of the noise, improving the exposure, restoring highlights, and even exposing more detail in the shadows. We'd stick with Night Mode for the ultrawide, if you can spare the time (it does take a few long seconds for each capture).

Night Mode samples from the ultrawide

3x shots at night are mostly from the dedicated camera, although if the app thinks there isn't enough light it will revert to cropping from the main sensor instead. The 10x telephoto will also trigger most of the time at night, unless you're in really dark places, in which case you're going to get digital zoom from the 3x tele snapper. Interestingly enough, for both 3x and 10x shots, if you go with the manual Night Mode, the resulting pictures will always come from each dedicated tele camera.

The 3x shots from the dedicated camera are mostly okay, with decent amounts of detail and low-ish noise. This magnification level works best where there's still light around, though.

Nighttime Auto samples from the 3x camera

Here are three samples where the main sensor was used instead, and you can see the image quality degradation pretty clearly even without zooming in too much or pixel peeping.

Nighttime 3x samples from the main sensor (cropped)

Night mode is slow (about 5 seconds) but does work wonders again, improving detail and exposure, and killing some more noise.

Night Mode samples from the 3x camera

The 10x shots come out good, with less noise than we expected (though it's still definitely very much present), accurate colors, and most of all - very high zooming.

Nighttime samples from the 10x camera

Here are three 10x samples where the dedicated sensor wasn't used, and instead we got digital zoom from the 3x cam. As you may have expected, the quality is worse.

Nighttime 10x samples from the 3x sensor (digitally zoomed)

Night Mode for the 10x shots is good if you can manage to keep the phone steady long enough for it to do its thing (and it does seem like this is by far the slowest Night Mode of the bunch). We're going to confess our hands are definitely too shaky for this. You can glance at our varying-degrees-of-blurry shots below, but the takeaway here is that we wouldn't recommend Night Mode for 10x shots unless you use a tripod.

Night Mode samples from the 10x camera

Selfies

Selfies have two zoom modes, as they did in the S20 Ultra, and in fact the performance is so similar that we're almost willing to bet that the S21 Ultra has kept the same sensor from its predecessor. For a long time we were under the impression that the selfie snapper always defaults to the more zoomed-in look, which saves 5 MP cropped photos, and if you want the more zoomed-out version, you'd need to tap the button on the viewfinder - these are 10 MP shots. However, as it turns out you can actually force the app to remember your preferred crop/zoom level, you just need to take a deep dive into its settings - so deep, in fact, that we initially missed this. Cue one more win for the "there's a setting for that!" people, and one more loss for default behavior that makes sense.

Selfie samples

Anyway, the selfies themselves are outstanding during the day, regardless of which "zoom level" you choose. There's a lot of detail, great dynamic range, good colors, and overall these just look the part. Of course, at night, it all depends on how much light there is still around you, if you don't use the screen flash function. The more light, the better shot, the less light, well... the more dark and blurry things become. Par for the course, then, but overall this is among the best selfie cameras ever.

Camera app

To conclude our camera experience, let's mention that the camera app was bug-free but there was always a lag when switching between sensors. This happens with every Android phone we've tested so far, but it was more pronounced on the S21 Ultra than we're used to in other flagships. Not by much, but definitely noticeable.

The June 2021 update was supposedly going to fix this, but, at least on our review unit, it didn't. Maybe it did improve things very slightly, but unperceivably. Some lag is still there, and that's our only niggle with the app - well, aside from the aforementioned default behavior when it comes to the selfie camera "zoom" choice. Other than that, it's all been smooth sailing. Samsung's camera app is very grown up and does its job well.