The Samsung Galaxy S20+, S20 Ultra Exynos & Snapdragon Review: Megalomania Devices
by Andrei Frumusanu on April 3, 2020 9:30 AM ESTDisplay Measurement
The Galaxy S20’s screens follow the same recipe that we found on the S10 and Note10 series, and other than the 120Hz display modes, the new panels don’t have any major new changes to them when it comes to features or display quality changes.
We move on to the display calibration and fundamental display measurements of the Galaxy S20 screen. As always, we thank X-Rite and SpecraCal, as our measurements are performed with an X-Rite i1Pro 2 spectrophotometer, with the exception of black levels which are measured with an i1Display Pro colorimeter. Data is collected and examined using Portrait Display's CalMAN software.
In terms of brightness, the S20 Ultra and S20+ fall in line with what we’ve seen from Samsung phones over the past few generations. The panel goes up to 325 nits in maximum manual brightness mode, and boosts up to 731 nits at full screen white when under auto brightness and high ambient light. The lower the APL of your content, the brighter the screen will become.
The S20 series is identical to the S10 series when it comes to the display settings; we find the phone comes by default in a “Vivid” mode with a larger color gamut target for all content. But what’s new here is that this generation Samsung has included a color temperature slider offering not only a few discrete choices between cool and warm, but it also gives the option for fine-tuning the RGB balance as well. Nevertheless, the accurate color profile for the phone is the “Natural” one which aims for sRGB colors for default contents and is able to support wider color targets for color managed applications.
Unfortunately, the S20 doesn’t really behave any different to the S10 series, and we find the same characteristics in the calibration between the phones. The worst offender here is the color temperature which is far too warm at an average of 6330K across all grey levels, and a white falling in at 6220K. Samsung keeps doing this year after year and at this point I just don’t know what the point is anymore in hoping that they would finally get it right.
The resulting gamma is also quite off and will wildly vary in the measurement depending on your pattern’s APL. We’ve had tons of phones fail at this aspect as the panels are calibrated without consideration of the CABC mechanisms of the display – for some vendors it’s even possible to retrace the methodologies and showcase where they went wrong in the calibration.
At this point I should note that we’ve slightly revamped our display reporting methodology, and have now moved from showcasing dE2000 error values to the newer dEITP standard, which is more strict in its error figure handling.
The S20 Ultra here ends up with a dEITP of 6.03 because of the color and luminosity errors, and just the color error would lend it a dEITP of 2.72. I’ll be remeasuring more devices and bring back comparison charts on other devices with the new dE standard in upcoming reviews.
Saturation targets for the S20 are also in line with what we’re used to from Galaxy phones – not great, but not totally bad either. The major issue again is the shift of the spectrum towards reds.
The Gretag MacBeth chart with common human color tones is also just somewhat acceptable, with the commonality of gamma errors, but also some larger hue errors due to the shift towards reds.
A Typical Galaxy Display
Overall, the S20 series come with what I’d call typical Galaxy displays. The panel is fantastic quality, and there’s nothing to criticize it in terms of its intrinsic qualities. The calibration is a bit more lackluster and in-line with what we’ve become accustomed from Samsung, key points being that the gamma is off yet again, and the Natural display mode is also too warm, yet again. It’s not a deal breaker, but Samsung has done better in the past. In any case, they remain high quality displays which are just short of being outstanding.
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MAGAover9000 - Tuesday, April 7, 2020 - link
I have the s10+. Fantastic device. Very happyid4andrei - Friday, April 3, 2020 - link
No need for me to praise this review any longer. Still, I must nitpick. The 3dmark GPU test always has caveats in your reviews. Drop it if you feel it is detected by OEMs or it's a false GPU test like the physics one.On web tests. I read on wiki that JetStream is an Apple made test, literally. Wouldn't you say that's a big caveat when testing against ios? Similarly Speedometer is developed by the webkit team at Apple. With Android webview based on Blink, not webkit, wouldn't Android smartphones be at a disadvantage against iphones? I don't see Kraken(Firefox) or Octane(Google) being used.
Kraken would actually be neutral to both. Other 3rd party tests might be Testdrive(Microsoft) or Basemark.
Andrei Frumusanu - Friday, April 3, 2020 - link
I don't think that the fact that the WebKit team made those tests is a valid argument against using them. You can go and read the source JS yourself if you wish, and they're industry accepted benchmarks. Both Kraken and Octane are ancient and outdated and we dropped them just like we dropped SunSpider of the early days.id4andrei - Friday, April 3, 2020 - link
Thank you for the prompt answer.s.yu - Friday, April 3, 2020 - link
Thank you Andrei, again the most comprehensive and reliable set of samples anywhere!There seems to be considerable sample variation again (last time with Samsung was the main module since S9 with the variable aperture) in the UWA, S20+E and S20UE should have absolutely identical UWA performance but the S20UE seems to have far worse sagittal resolution than the S20+E, and Samsung's processing isn't that good in the first place, considering the 12MP 1.4μm could produce incredibly sharp pictures as that been the specs of the Pixels' main module for generations.
I don't regret their switch to f/1.8 because the old module that went up to f/1.5 wasn't sharp wide open, especially in the corners, but a further two stops' variation to f/3.3 could be useful for more DoF in closeups provided inserting that physical aperture into the tiny module doesn't compromise the optical design otherwise.
This time around the E seems to generally outperform the S, except in color as E doesn't seem to have proper color fidelity...almost as if chroma NR is set too high even in broad daylight, and the "hybridization" of the digital zoom, in which the E clearly uses a smaller portion from the periscope's readout than the S in the resulting merge. Speaking of the zoom, S20+ still performs slightly worse at 2x(16MP readout) than S10's native 12MP, though the difference is small and could be down to lens variation. Considering S10U's Z height, they could've easily fixed the S20U like Xiaomi, going 1/2.3" f/2 12MP with the 2x. Xiaomi used it despite a 4-1 bin, all the more reason to use it with a 9-1 bin. S20U's corner performance at 3x would also be much improved.
Regarding the comparison with the Fuji though, I suspect your unit has trouble focusing to infinity correctly, because the train and forest samples show clear superiority of the Fuji's zoom. I especially recognize that kind of slight haziness as being very responsive to dehaze and low radius sharpening in LR and would result in far more detail with extraction in post. Also, with an ILC, there's always stopping down a little for more sharpness and more DoF.
Regarding the full res modes, it's not worth storing 108MP of data with the CFA asking for a 9-1 bin, of course the 64MP would be better, without the RAW it's hard to say for sure, but the 64MP seems to be quad bayer.
s.yu - Friday, April 3, 2020 - link
I don't agree with your remark about the night comparison with Mate30P though, the UWA is not "UW" so it has better image quality, that's true, and the night mode of the Mate30P is far superior, that's also true, but not auto mode, nor any aspect of the telephoto as it's clearly using a crop of the main for 3x. Samsung does attempt to use the 4x for telephoto and although there's a significant issue of chroma noise, it's far sharper than Mate30P's crop, with at least twice 3 times the effective resolution in night mode. With S20U you could also crop out a single shot 3-4x of similar brightness to the Mate30P crop, but it's just a crop.As for the potential of P40P surpassing S20U, that model operates on a 9.4MP crop by default, interpolated to 12.5MP which clearly has consequences. In daylight it's often a regression compared to P30P (much less match Mate30P), and in night shots using the current firmware it has severe color issues of rendering large portions of the scene as a crimson red, so it's hard to say at this point too.
s.yu - Friday, April 3, 2020 - link
Oh, there's exception of the Mate30P auto mode in the last sample, but the night mode isn't constantly superior either.RealBeast - Friday, April 3, 2020 - link
I've been looking forward to getting one of these, not sure which yet. The fly in the ointment now is that I won't see my Mom (who gets my old S9+) until the Fall due to the whole COVID problem, not to mention less income. That will weigh heavily on sales of what is otherwise an amazing looking phone for me.29a - Friday, April 3, 2020 - link
How large are the picture file sizes created by this thing?BedfordTim - Sunday, April 5, 2020 - link
The same size as any other 12MP camera. They will depend on content, hdr, motion and compression options but I would expect about 36MB for a raw image and 8MB for a high quality jpeg.