Above: The camera system on the S21 Ultra. Photo courtesy Samsung.

BitDepth#1293 for March 18, 2021

The Galaxy S21 series of smartphones represents an incremental improvement over the S20 series released – in a stroke of truly monumental ill-fortune – just as the covid19 pandemic swept the world, shutting down transport systems, storefronts and supply chains.

By the time I got one of the devices to test, almost six months had passed since its release, making any review more of a history lesson than buyer’s guidance (Note20 review here).
This time around, my test window happened early, as did the launch of the device.

The new features in the S21 lineup are a mix of tidied features, new tools suggested by pandemic-era use of smartphones and a general second pass at making the S series the go-to device for Android smartphone users.
Video is improved allowing 60 frames per second capture in 4K and can capture 8K at 24fps.

In Pro mode, the video screen is well populated with indicators, including a VU meter with live indicators for audio levels.
Director View is a Covid-19 inspired effort at turning a smartphone into a videoblogging tool.

It’s a well-considered move, allowing a user to put a tiny picture-in-picture view of the user captured from the selfie camera into the main video frame, picture-in-picture mode. It’s easy to move the postage stamp sized image around within the frame.

With a tap of a button, it’s possible switch the cameras around or choose split screen, which is, in terms of video switching, an absolutely boss feature to have front and centre on a live stream, though lining up subject matter and presenter views can be challenging.

Director view also replaces the tiny leaf (flame? fir tree?) Icons that Samsung uses as indicators of the lens in use with big buttons that preview the angle of view if you switch between the available rear cameras.
While the layout is improved significantly and is more usable, the way this switching works in practice is still somewhat glitchy.

The S20 also allowed you to switch between lenses in a live video albeit without the previews, but the result is the same, a jarring jump between different focal lengths. It’s a feature that urgently needs some software smoothing.

Lens switching for live video is at its best on the S 21 Ultra, which includes three lenses, a 13 mm ultrawide, the 24 mm standard wide lens found on most devices, along with 70 mm and 240 mm telephoto lenses.

The longer lens lies flat in the device like a hidden periscope and is redirected rearward with a prism reflector.
One big improvement for still photographers using Pro mode to access the camera’s RAW files is the addition of RAW capture for the wide-angle lens. The longer lenses don’t get any RAW love this time around and the results, in terms of image quality, are mixed at best.

The quality of images captured with the 108 megapixel capture option in regular Photo mode aren’t stellar either. Packing that much capture into the phone’s tiny image sensor results in unsightly artifacts, particularly at higher ISOs.

Photographs taken at 108MP and 12MP are essentially the same, with more artifacts showing up on the larger file as seen in this deep crop into a captured image..

For maximum image quality you are better off capturing at the 12MP and enlarging that file.
You get acceptable image quality for photos and video all around, but there are some immutable laws of physics that Samsung hasn’t been able to change, even with the S21 Ultra.

You get the best image quality out of the camera system by capturing RAW files in Pro mode, but you can only use the 13mm and 24mm lenses. By comparison, the Huawei P30 Pro has been able to shoot RAW files with its telephoto lens since 2019.

Using the zoom function gives variable results in telephoto mode, because the device uses software interpolation between the two lenses to work out intermediate focal lengths.
Image quality is best at 3x and 10x but not great because of aggressive post-processing, and since there is, for instance, no 100mm lens, the phone interpolates, or guesses, based on information gathered from the lenses it does have.

Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn’t.
Digital zoom is reliably terrible, but that isn’t unique to Samsung, it’s just a bad way to take photos across all camera systems.

There are some measured improvements to overall smartphone features.
The chipset has been improved, and the attractive moving lockscreens and main screens are a wholly gratuitous demonstration of the horsepower available on the device.

Face recognition has also been improved. It’s still far from the accuracy of Apple’s depth mapping system, but I got far fewer misfires on the S21 Ultra compared to the S20, which only “sees” me around 25 percent of the time.

The S21 Ultra alone in the line-up is compatible with the SPen from the Note series, but you’ll have to buy that separately and budget for a case that gives you somewhere to store it, because there’s no storage slot for it on the new phones.

There’s also no charger in the box or slot for a MicroSD card, so buy the model with the capacity you need and fish out a charger from storage.

If you have a Samsung Note 10 or earlier or an S10, there’s enough new in the S21 series to encourage a serious look. The Ultra model makes a bold bid to be king of the hill of the entire Samsung lineup, so it’s going to be interesting to see what the next Note will bring.