Samsung Galaxy A52s long-term review

Display quality, refresh rate, settings

The screen is probably one of the A52s' best features, which is understandable considering it's an AMOLED manufactured by sister company Samsung Display. It helps the A52s stand out among its similarly priced peers, being a quality panel. Of course it's not going to match a Samsung flagship in resolution, brightness or quality, but it's not far behind in any respect, which is definitely commendable.

Its resolution is basically the norm for a mid-range smartphone, and it's probably good enough for flagships too, unless you're the type of person to really go looking for pixels. We never felt the need for more, and if you do, then unfortunately you're going to have to shell out top dollar for a top of the line device.

The A52s' display also has 120 Hz refresh rate, which is great but expected even in the mid-range nowadays. Only OnePlus still thinks it can get away with 90 Hz panels on mid-rangers, every other company has gone to 120 Hz and that's a huge boon for the user experience. The implementation is a bit rough around the edges compared to what we've seen in Samsung flagships with 120 Hz panels. On the A52s, there's no dynamic switching of refresh rates, you can pick from 60 Hz and 120 Hz and you'll get what you choose at all times.

Motion smoothness (refresh rate) setting

In theory, this can hurt battery life, although in practice, as you'll see in the appropriate section of this review, it's still very good even so - we only used the phone set to 120 Hz, since we don't think there's any point in getting a high refresh rate screen and not trying to take advantage of that.

There are still some apps that insist on running at 60 Hz no matter what (Google Maps and Camera come to mind), but they are just exceptions to the rule outlined above. Overall, this is a pretty smooth screen, and despite the fact that it isn't LTPO and thus can't dynamically adjust the refresh rate, it performs very well.

In terms of brightness, it doesn't go up to the peaks we've seen in flagship smartphones, which is understandable given the price. But the screen is still legible in direct sunlight, even if you might have to squint a little from time to time. It's among the brightest panels at this price point however, and that says it all.

We also enjoyed the auto brightness curve very much, finding that we very rarely had to resort to making manual adjustments. Most of the time, the algorithm got it right, and it actually performed better in this regard than the much more expensive Galaxy Z Flip3 and Z Fold3 that we've recently reviewed long-term. This may in fact be the best tuned auto brightness algorithm in any mid-range smartphone, at least of those we got to try. You won't have problems at night either, with the screen being able to go dim enough so as to not hurt your eyes when viewing it in dark environments.

Display settings

As usual with Samsung phones, you can pick between two color profiles. Natural is tuned for the best sRGB accuracy, and while it doesn't hit that color space entirely accurately, it's pretty close. The default profile is Vivid, which aims to match the P3 color space, and does a slightly worse job at that than the Natural one does for sRGB.

Screen mode settings

Vivid is the customizable profile, letting you adjust the color temperature with a slider. You also get custom white point adjustment, so if you want a very specific look for your phone's display, you can surely find a combo that will suit you.

Eye comfort shield, Always On Display

Like any other recent smartphone, the A52s also has a blue light filter, which Samsung calls Eye comfort shield. It's not as customizable as Xiaomi's, but gets the job done with a color temperature slider and not much else. It's also schedulable, and you can even pick an automatic mode in which the effect's intensity changes based on the time of day. That's the bare minimum we'd be looking for in such a feature, and it's covered.

A weird quirk is that the filter is turned off for the Always On Display and the lock screen, presumably because it would interfere with fingerprint unlocking - since the optical sensor basically shoots light at your finger in order to read it. That would be fine, but the issue is that after you unlock the phone the filter is generally laggy to turn itself back on again - this takes anywhere from half a second to two seconds and it gets more noticeable the more you have that color temperature slider to the right - the more intense the effect, the more obvious it is when it turns on.

Eye comfort shield settings

Speaking of the Always On Display, as this is an AMOLED panel the feature is present of course, and it's the full thing, unlike on some mid-range competitors that don't actually get truly always on functionality. It's also plenty customizable, though it is lacking some of the more advanced features seen in the likes of MIUI.

Always On Display settings

That said, it will probably work very well for a majority of people, allowing you to select various analog and digital clocks, images from your Gallery, stickers, Bitmoji, and more. You can pick its orientation and schedule it too, and control how always on it is - this ranges from fully to only showing up when you tap the screen or you get a new notification. Overall, this feature that has become essential for a lot of people is done very nicely.

Display related niggles

While the display itself is, as we already mentioned, one of the best parts about the A52s, it also incorporates one of the weirdest, and that is the selfie camera embedded in a punch-hole in the center. We don't mean the camera itself, mind you, but the pointless silver ring around it which catches the light in a lot of different ways and reflects it back at you.

We thought the whole point of punch-hole selfie cameras was to make them as unobtrusive as possible, but that ring negates a lot of that gain for no apparent reason whatsoever. You can easily get used to it, of course, we just can't figure out who thought it was a good idea to add it and why. Samsung isn't alone in this, however - over the past few years we've seen plenty of similar implementations from some of its competitors too, and we were left similarly baffled when dealing with those.

Since we're complaining, let's also mention the either non-existent, or simply very bad anti fingerprint coating on the screen. Ours is a retail unit of the A52s, so this is exactly the experience any buyer would get if purchasing one, and the screen very easily fills up with fingerprints within minutes of use. You'll want to have a microfiber cloth at the ready at all times if you dislike the oily fingerprinty look on your phone's screen, that's for sure.

Of course this problem becomes entirely irrelevant if you apply a screen protector, since then it's all up to that screen protector's anti fingerprint coating to protect you from the aforementioned mess. And most of the good glass ones actually have a significantly better coating than the A52s does out of the box. That is, if there even is one - we can't tell. This is just one of those things that cheapens the feeling of using the phone, and we're left wondering how much it would have cost Samsung to use the same type of coating its flagships come with.