Last year, Samsung released its most ambitious (non-folding) phone to date: the Galaxy S20 Ultra. It didn't go over especially well. A sky-high $1400 price tag and unremarkable camera performance torpedoed the phone outright in our final assessment, a rare miss for Samsung in the premium smartphone segment.
In 2021, Samsung is trying to reboot the Galaxy S20 Ultra formula with the S21 Ultra. And while the differences on paper (and often in practice) aren't what you'd call huge, the end result is a more palatably priced phone with a much-improved camera system — notably addressing our two biggest gripes.
I've been using the S21 Ultra for nearly two weeks now, and this feels very much like the phone the Galaxy S20 Ultra should have been. And while I think the price is still eye-popping in its own right, it's also no longer bizarrely out of step with the iPhone, lending Samsung more credibility with customers leery of the Ultra's value proposition. For the Samsung fan who wants a massive, uncompromising phone, this is as good as it gets. It also happens to be the best camera phone I've ever used.
Impressed? I certainly was. This is easily the sharpest telephoto smartphone camera I've ever used, and the processing in good light is simply outstanding. I can't heap enough praise on this thing, and it's quickly become the only lens I want to use to take a picture of anything with. The clarity, sharpness, and relatively restrained processing make for photos you simply don't see from smartphones, because you can achieve perspectives and angles that would be difficult to shoot with even the S21 Ultra's standard 3x zoom sensor.
The main camera seems quite good, too, and I think that's mostly down to the processing changes and the fact that Samsung is using its new HM3 sensor, a relatively minor update on the hardware found in the Note20 Ultra and S20 Ultra that adds support for 8K30 video capture, 12-bit still image capture, and some tweaks to HDR and noise reduction.
