Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra has it all: a 200-megapixel camera and 100x zoom
The Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra. Picture: Noel Campion.
The new S23 Ultra is the pinnacle of Samsung’s Galaxy lineup and although on the surface it may seem like it’s only an iterative update from the S22 Ultra, the culmination of improvements make a difference. There are meaningful upgrades in the cameras, battery life and overall performance that should at least entice those with older Galaxy Note and S line of phones to upgrade.
The S23 Ultra looks almost identical to the S22 Ultra from last year but there are some subtle changes. The S23 Ultra has some slightly bigger camera lenses to accommodate a massive, 200MP sensor.
The display glass doesn't curve over the sides of the phone quite as aggressively this year, and there is more surface area to grip onto from the sides, making the phone more comfortable to hold.
I’m a massive fan of the S23 Ultra display which has tiny rounded corners that maximise screen area as opposed to the massive corners on phones like the iPhone 14 Pro Max. Although the display is almost flat it does have curved sides that still create shadows — it’s less noticeable in dark mode. Another nitpick is the asymmetrical bezels with the bottom one being slightly larger than the rest.
The top edge is completely flat while the bottom is also flat but has a little bump where the S-Pen resides. I love the idea of having a stylus and Samsung provide a massive range of apps and features to take advantage of the S-Pen, but I rarely found a reason to use it during the past two weeks of testing the phone.
The S23 Ultra is one of the first devices to get Corning Gorilla Glass Victus+ for improved drop protection and it also comes with IP68 dust and waterproofing for additional durability.
My review unit was the cream variant, which is stunning in the hand and easily one of the best-looking smartphones of 2023 I’ve reviewed.
The S23 Ultra has the same display as the S22 Ultra although a minor tweak means an improvement in energy efficiency and peak brightness. It has a 6.8-inch QHD+ Edge Dynamic AMOLED 2X display with an adaptive refresh rate for super-smooth scrolling from 1Hz to 120Hz. It also features a 240Hz touch sampling rate in-game mode.
As you’d expect from a Samsung display, it can get blindingly bright with a peak brightness of up to 1750 nits and a 3 million:1 contrast ratio that makes viewing content on the large display more immersive.
A big change to the European versions of the new Galaxy S23 lineup is the playing field has been levelled. In previous models up to and including the S22 lineup, Samsung used their in-house Exynos chipset in European and other territories but the rest of the world received Qualcomm’s Snapdragon. While there wasn’t anything wrong with the Exynos silicon, the Snapdragon-powered devices were faster and more efficient. This year, the S23 comes with the latest Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 for Galaxy, which offers the best in performance and battery life.
I’ve run a lot of benchmarks and the S23 Ultra is slightly faster than other phones with the 8 Gen 2 thanks to a tweak in clock speeds. During my two weeks of real-world testing, I found the S23 Ultra was silky smooth and responsive regardless of what I was doing on it. From playing the latest games to multitasking, the phone never lagged, paused or glitched. I would also add that it never got uncomfortably warm, even while playing games like Genshin Impact for long periods. That being said, dedicated gaming phones like the Redmagic 8 Pro which also feature the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 are able to sustain performance for longer thanks to their active cooling.
While the Galaxy version of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 may have a slightly higher clock speed (1 core at 3.36GHz versus 3.18GHz) over the standard versions, in my real-world testing it wasn’t noticeable.
Storage is fixed with no microSD card support and my base review model came with 256GB and 12GB of RAM but there are 512GB and 1TB options available too.
Where the S23 Ultra really shines is in battery performance despite having the same 5,000mAh capacity as last time. This is in part thanks to the new 8 Gen 2 being a lot more efficient. I had no problem getting through a heavy day of use and at a stretch, I was able to achieve up to two days.
While the battery life is excellent, the charging situation hasn’t improved. There’s no charging brick in the box and regardless of which charger I used, I was only able to achieve a maximum charge rate of 28 watts — based on the specs of the phone it should be able to charge at a rate of 45 watts using the optional Samsung charger. In an age where we have phones that can safely charge to 100% in less than 15 minutes, this feels rather slow by comparison.
The biggest changes on the S23 Ultra this year are to the cameras. While it’s not the first phone to receive a 200MP sensor, it’s the first I’ve tested. It might sound insane to put a 200MP sensor on a phone when full-frame mirrorless cameras top out at just over 60MP — even medium format cameras like the Phase One IQ4 use a mere 150MP sensor. Of course, you can’t compare a tiny phone camera sensor to the likes of a medium or full-frame camera because there’s so much more to image quality than just megapixels.
The 200MP sensor is on the primary camera with an aperture of f/1.7 and the amount of detail that it captures is astonishing. If you just take the phone out of the box, open up the camera app and snap a picture, it's not actually using all 200MP. It's doing some pixel binning to reduce it down to a 12MP image, which is a more manageable file size and amount of image data. You can switch to 200MP mode in the camera app, but it will save down as a highly compressed HEIF file of approximately 10MB. If you want to shoot in RAW you have to download and install Expert RAW, but this will only allow you to shoot in 50MP mode which produces 120MB files approximately. In reality, most people will only shoot the standard 12MP mode which is perfectly fine, but it’s nice to know you have a higher-quality option and RAW support if you like to do a lot of post-processing.
Most of the time, the colours and sharpness on the S23 ultra are a little overcooked. I found colours too saturated for my liking, but this is a matter of personal preference and many users will love the extra pop of colour even if it’s less realistic. I also find the HDR too aggressive — it tries to capture all of the detail in both highlights and shadows to the point where contrast is lost or at least reduced. Again, your mileage may differ.
It's more consistent with shooting in dark, indoor scenes and does a great job with nailing focus.
One of the areas where the S23 Ultra streaks ahead of the competition is in the zoom department. It has three and 10 times optical zoom cameras that are insanely versatile when shooting objects that are far away. Even the digital zoom of up to 30 times is still perfectly usable. Although I wouldn't use the full 100x digital zoom for anything more than a neat party trick — impress your friends by taking a cool photo of the moon.
The weirdest change to this new camera system is on the front. Samsung on paper has actually downgraded the selfie camera from 40MP all the way down to 12MP. While it may look like a step backwards on paper the results of my test shots tell a different story. Overall, the portraits I captured looked better compared to my test shots from the S22 Ultra. As I said, more megapixels don’t always mean better image quality. In this case, the low light performance is greatly improved as are detail and colour reproduction.
The only persistent issue which also plagued the S22 Ultra is shutter lag. I’m not sure if this is down to the camera app not being optimised or if the 200MP sensor has too much data to process. I found it frustrating at the start but as long as you remember to keep the camera focused on your subject a second or two after you take the shot you will be okay.
Video quality and image stabilisation have been improved too — even 8K video capture is decent now although I still wouldn’t use it.
I love all of the options Samsung provides within the default camera app. You can simply point and shoot or choose one of the many modes to have some fun with.
The Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra is the most complete phone on the market with the fastest hardware, the most versatile camera system, S-Pen support included and a UI that has been refined to the point where it’s super slick. While it’s not worth upgrading from an S22 Ultra, you could argue that the latter is a better buy taking into account the value-for-money proposition.
Either way, the S23 Ultra is a great phone and comes highly recommended.
Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra - 256GB, €1,459, 512GB, €1,639 and 1TB, €1,879.
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