Samsung today has unveiled their new Galaxy S smartphones for 2020 and they are jam packed with features. These are the Galaxy S20, Galaxy S20 Plus and the new premium Galaxy S20 Ultra
Displays
Starting off with the displays, they all sport a 3200 x 1440p display that can go upto 120Hz. The Galaxy S20 has a 6.2″ display, the S20 Plus has a 6.7″ display while the Ultra has an insane 6.9″ display.
This is a trend in the industry where faster refresh rate displays have become a huge selling point. Faster refresh rates have the benefit of having the user interface feeling “significantly smoother” and also way smoother gaming experience in supported titles.
However, that 120Hz refresh rate is only supported on 1080p (2400 x 1800) which is unfortunate and if you switch to 1440p, the display will go back to 60Hz. The displays still have the center hole punch like we saw on the Note 10 and they look quite nice.
Cameras
Samsung also went ahead to change the cameras. The Galaxy S20 has a 3X telephoto 64MP camera with a f/2.0 aperture lens, a 12MP ultra wide angle camera with f/2.2 aperture and 1/2.55″ sensor and a 12MP main camera with f/1.8 lens and a large 1/1.76″ sensor. The S20 Plus has the same cameras as the S20 but adds depth sensors. They both share the same 10MP selfie camera that we saw with the S10 family.
The cameras can give you upto 30x hybrid zoom which is great for zooming on objects. Also, the addition of physically larger sensors is great for low light shots and for better bokeh (background blur) when taking photos upclose.
The S20 Ultra has a different setup. It has a 12MP 1/2.55″ ultra wide camera, a 108MP 1/1.33″ main camera with an f/1.8 aperture and a 10x zoom 48MP f/3.5 telephoto camera. It can do hybrid optical zoom of 10x but the digital zoom can go upto 100 times, which is way more than its siblings. It also one ups its siblings on the selfie camera with a 40MP selfie camera.
Samsung has a “folded lens” for the Galaxy S20 Ultra and it reminds us of the periscope lens of the P30 Pro. That is why its telephoto camera is able to achieve 4x zoom. Samsung extends that zoom to 10x through pixel binning (combining multiple pixels to one big pixel) and sensor cropping. That is an interesting way for them to achieve telephoto capability that is unlike the P30 Pro.
The phones also support 8K recording at 24fps which I believe is the first for a smartphone so far. There was another phone that shot 8K videos last year but it wasn’t usable. 24fps is used in movies and it means you’ll be able to shoot videos that are 16 times more detailed than your typical 1080p videos, super overkill. However, this 8K video is shot with the telephoto camera since 8K video needs a minimum of 33MP.
The Galaxy S20 has a 4000mAh battery, the S20 Plus has a 4500mAh battery and the S20 Ultra has a 5000mAh battery which is great on paper. Samsung is not usually known for big batteries on their phones but you can bet why they did that. The 120Hz displays will need a lot of power and probably that is why they did it.
The batteries are charged with the included 25W fast charging bricks and of course wireless charging. The S20 Ultra has 45W fast charging.
5G
5G is the theme of this decade and this family supports 5G in an odd way. The regular S20 lacks the super fast mmWave 5G (over 30Ghz 5G) and you’re stuck with the low end version of 5G. The S20 Plus and the Ultra support mmWave 5G.
Others
They both run the new Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 chip or the Exynos 990 with 12GB of RAM and base storage of 128 GB. The Galaxy S20 Plus and the Ultra have the option of getting 512GB of internal storage. The S20 Ultra has an insane 16GB RAM option which is ridiculous at this point.
They also feature in display ultrasonic fingerprint scanners, stereo speakers with Dolby Atmos and Bluetooth 5.0.
Prices
They will be available starting on March 6th and prices will start from $999 for the S20, $1199 for the S20 Plus and $1399 for the S20 Ultra.
