Over the past few weeks, I've been using a Samsung Galaxy S21 as my primary phone, and it's worked quite well for me. As I said when the S21 family was announced, photo and video features top the list of changes in this version, but there are a number of other features that I found quite interesting.
The S21 is the smallest of the family, with a 6.2-inch display and a list price of $799. The others in the family include the S21+, which has a 6.7-inch display at $999; and the S21 Ultra, with a more advanced 6.8-inch, higher-resolution display and a more powerful zoom lens at $1,199.
Although the S21 is the smallest of the family, the 6.2-inch display seemed sufficient, although I've gotten a bit used to larger phones. Measuring 5.97 x 2.8 x .31 inches (HWD) and weighing just over 6 ounces, it fit well in my hand. The unit I tried has a violet color; and the three cameras on the back protrude a bit, though not as much as on other phones I've used lately.
As with Samsung phones for the past few years, it has an AMOLED display that is quite bright and vivid. It offers FHD+ resolution (2,400-by-1,080), HDR10+, and an adaptive refresh rate that automatically adjusts the display between 48Hz and 120Hz depending on what you're doing. As a result, scrolling on a web page looked particularly smooth. It's also particularly good for game playing, although that's not something I do much. You can also set the phone to a fixed 60Hz rate, which Samsung says will save battery (though I didn't notice a problem with the default adaptive setting).
Samsung says the phones have improved visibility in bright outdoor light, and the phone did seem a bit brighter. It also has a feature to reduce blue light, something that is becoming more common and is certainly welcome.
Arguably, the most important features deal with photography and video capture; as this is really where most phones try to differentiate themselves, both through the hardware and increasingly, through the software that controls it. The S21 has three rear cameras: There's a 12-megapixel wide-angle main camera, a 12MP ultra wide-angle, and 64MP telephoto. There's a 10MP front-facing camera which works through a hole at the very top of the display in what Samsung calls "Infinity-O." It's not just the physical cameras; it's also the image processing capabilities of the processor and crucially the software that provides for different features.
Not surprisingly, the phone takes excellent everyday pictures, although that's now the case with pretty much every smartphone that costs $300 or more. Typical photos were sharp, with good details and very nice dynamic range.
The main rear-facing camera has a 79-degree field-of view, and f/1.8 aperture, making it pretty flexible. It has 1.8 µm pixels, which is larger than on most phones, and thus it is better in capturing details. And, again, like most phones, it will switch into a night mode, where if you hold the phone steady, it will take the photo for a longer period of time. Generally, I thought night pictures were quite good. They seem a little softer than those I took with the iPhone (which sometimes seem over-sharpened), probably due to software noise reduction, but generally quite good.
The ultra-wide camera offers a 120-degree field-of-view and f/2.2 aperture; I also was quite happy with the photos I took with it.
But one area which has improved dramatically in the past few years is zoom. The 64MP telephoto camera has a 76-degree field-of-view and f 2/0. Samsung says the telephoto lens gives you a 3X "hybrid optic" zoom; which when added to digital zoom, creates what Samsung calls a "30X space zoom." One important new feature is optical image stabilization, which you'll need to keep the phone steady for zoom shots. There's no question that the zoom here is better than that on the regular Galaxy S20 or the regular iPhone 12 (which lacks a telephoto lens). It did a great job with optical zoom, and adding digital zoom was okay at 5x or 10x in many situations, but I still didn't think 30x photos ended up with good photos, at least not when handheld.
Here are some photos with the ultra-wide (0.5x), normal (1x), zoom (3x), and space zoom features:
In summary, I thought the zoom was good. Much better than most cameras, but not as good as the one on the Galaxy Note Ultra. I haven't tried the S21 Ultra (which has both 3X and 10X optical zoom). I would be interested in seeing how that compares.
The front-facing camera has an 80-degree field of view and a f/2.2 aperture. Some other phones have more wide-angle front cameras, and the S21 Ultra has a 40-megapixel one with a larger pixel size when used in 10MP mode. New this year is a dual-pixel autofocus, which results in sharper selfies. Samsung also talks about an improved auto white balance feature that it says makes for more natural skin colors. I don't take a lot of selfies, but this worked well for things like video calls.
Perhaps my favorite photography feature on the S21 is Single Take, a mode introduced on last year's models that captures a variety of images and videos all at once. It's a fun way of capturing a lot of different kinds of things. With the S21, this has been improved with new AI features to do things like add dynamic slow motion, and automatically stitch the videos together into a highlight reel. This won't replace individual editing, but I was impressed by how good some of these automatic videos looked.
And of course, there are the usual assortment of other camera options, mostly hidden behind a "more" menu option, including a Pro mode, modes for slow motion and "super slow mo," portrait, hyperlapse, panorama, and food modes.
The S21 has some unusual video features.
As with last year's model, it has all sorts of video capture modes, from FHD 30fps to UHD (4K) at up to 60 fps to 8K video capture at 24 frames per second. Since the phone doesn't have an 8K display and I don't have an 8K TV, I couldn't really tell the difference in resolution, but I can see where professionals might want the higher resolution. For most of us, the lower resolutions are fine. There is one great feature about 8K video though. Using the Gallery application, you can pull a 33 megapixel still image directly from the video as you view it, so that you don't have to choose between capturing video and taking still images.
The most interesting new feature is a Director's View, which gives you a live thumbnail of images from all three rear cameras and the front camera, so you can instantly switch between the cameras. You can choose to take video from a single camera, or show the front-facing camera in a window or side-by-side with a rear camera, creating a "vlogger view" which lets you simultaneously capture videos from the front and rear cameras. I can see where it might be quite interesting for someone filming a training video, or for a realtor showing off some property. It lets you create video with two cameras from one device, so you don't need a camera crew. Other options include directional audio.
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Of course, for gaming in particular, as well as photography, a new processor helps. The unit I tried, like others sold in the US, is powered by the 8-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 which has one X1 ARM core, three Cortex-A78, and four Cortex A-55 cores, along with Adreno 660 graphics, manufactured on a 5nm process. The unit comes with 8GB of RAM as well as 256GB of storage. (In some other part of the world, Samsung uses the Exynos 2100 processor.) It benchmarks faster than last year's model, but in actual use, I'm hard pressed to see any difference in normal use—it works quite well, but so have models for the past several years. Unlike older generations of Galaxy phones, this year's models no longer have a microSD slot, which would come in handy given the sizes of the videos and photos you can create these days.
It has support for both sub6 and mmWave 5G. I got good speeds with the phone. In fact, I saw higher speed from LTE (over 200 Mbps down, almost 60 Mbps up) than 5G on Verizon in the area I tried it, which does not have any mmWave coverage. Your results will vary depending on location. It also has support for Wi-Fi 6 and 6E, as well as ultra-wide band (UWB). Samsung talks a lot about this as preparing for what comes next, particularly in heavily saturated environments, and how UWB can be used to give more precise location, but for the most part whether you'll see any advantage depends on having other devices that support these standards.
There are a few security enhancements as well. The on-screen fingerprint reader is said to be 1.7 times as large, so it's easier to hit the right spot on the screen. I found this to be a lot more reliable than the fingerprint reader on the S20, and that's particularly useful in a world where we wear masks a lot of the time. (It does offer face unlock, but that's not very secure.)
The DeX mode, which lets the phone be used more like a desktop when hooked up to an external monitor, now includes a wireless mode, first introduced on the Galaxy Note last August. This concept will get more useful as more monitors and TVs that support Miracast become more prevalent. Perhaps more useful, there's now a DeX application that lets you run the phone in a window on your Windows PC or Mac; including in a wireless mode as long as you are on the same Wi-Fi network. This makes it easier, and I can see it being particularly useful for something like a presentation into a conference room at work.
In the rest of the family, the S21+ is pretty much the same phone with a larger display and a bigger battery. The S21 Ultra adds a number of photo enhancements, including a 108MP main camera, higher-quality front-facing camera, and a dual telephoto lens system with both 3X and 10X optical zooms (through what Samsung calls a "double-folded lens") and now support for Samsung's S-pen stylus.
The Galaxy 21 has a list price of $799, which is $200 less than the original entry price of the S20. In part, Samsung is getting there by not including earbuds or a charger, which the company is positioning as being "green" but really seems like a cost-savings measure. (Apple did something similar with the iPhone 12, which has the same starting price for its 6.1-inch model).
Overall, the S21 is a nice step up from last year's S20 at a lower entry price. It's not as flashy as its Ultra sibling but packs a lot of power—including a pretty nice zoom—in a more compact package.
The Link LonkApril 27, 2021 at 03:31AM
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Living with the Samsung Galaxy S21 - PCMag
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