The level of detail is fairly low across the tele zoom range, with unnaturally-rendered texture and fusion artifacts. The tele does not quite live up to the expectations raised by the impressive-looking dual-tele setup. The ultra-wide camera offers an expansive field of view, but like with the primary wide camera, noise has a negative impact on image quality. The Zoom score of 76 is helped by a decent ultra-wide performance.
Image noise can get quite intrusive and is not just limited to the grainy look of luminance noise - sometimes chromatic noise is visible, too. At the same time, noise is visible in pretty much all images, even those recorded in bright light. There is a noticeable loss of fine detail when shooting indoors and in low light. The texture/ noise trade-off is an area where the S21 Ultra 5G leaves most room for improvement, especially noise is a lot worse than on some direct competitors. The autofocus system also slows down in low-light and high-contrast scenes, but otherwise the device mostly delivers accurately focused images.
HDR processing can be a little unstable, though, with noticeable variation between consecutive shots of the same scene.Ĭolor looks nice and skin tones are pleasant when shooting at reasonable light levels, but saturation decreases in low light. Target exposure is usually accurate and dynamic range is wide, showing good detail in both highlight and shadow areas of the frame. The S21 Ultra 5G delivers nice colors and skin tones in good light. For more information about the DXOMARK Camera test protocol, click here. More details on how we score smartphone cameras are available here. This article is designed to highlight the most important results of our testing.
A 70 mm lens takes care of medium-range tele shots, while a 240 mm juggernaut allows for extremely long tele-zooming. In the camera department, the Galaxy S21 Ultra comes with a major improvement over its predecessor S20 Ultra-replacing the latter’s 103 mm-equivalent periscope tele-lens with a dual-tele setup. The large, bright 6.8-inch Dynamic AMOLED 2x display with a 20:9 aspect ratio is a great screen for any type of content creation, thanks to a high 3200 x 1440- pixel resolution and flexible frame rates up to 120 Hz.
The international version of the device, the subject of this test, is powered by Samsung’s 5nm Exynos 2100 top-end chipset and is the company’s first non-Note device to offer S-Pen stylus support. Samsung’s new S-series flagship, the Galaxy S21 Ultra 5G, comes with an updated design and a whole bunch of improvements under the hood.