**** The Official Samsung Galaxy S20 Family Thread ****

Soldato
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My buds were out for delivery also but work stopped taking personal parcels due to coronavirus and the driver was on stop 40 something and I was 110 or so, at about 5pm... so didn't expect them to try delivering anyway.

In the end it was marked as "could not locate property" and work won't be accepting parcels any time soon anyway.

I couldn't redirect to my postcode just 6 miles away which is a bit rubbish, so luckily redirected to someone who lives near work and will grab them from him at some point.

Probably going to sell them to be honest like I did with the S10 ones ha
So Yodel are utter crap.

Yesterday evening they 'delivered' the buds to the guy who lives near work's house, who I re-directed them to... except, they didn't. They never turned up there (he has a doorbell cam with motion alerts).

They marked them as delivered and sent me a text to confirm as such.

Then today, surprise surprise they are out for delivery again.

End of the day rolls around and yes, you guessed it, they also 'could not locate property' even though it is a different address and the property is very much there (much like the massive office building they couldn't locate) :( Absolutely useless!

My friend had hers 'delivered' to work despite the fact work aren't taking parcels... and yes, of course, she didn't get hers either. The road name is similar style to "Cambridge Road" and the property they have been delivered to (following this example) is showing as "Cambridge". She queried this with them and explained there isn't such a property. And their response was "Do you know where Cambridge is?" - so yes great, narrowed it down to an entire city... Well done Yodel.... muppets.
 
Soldato
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I'm going to return mine too. S8 Plus I've still got is more than up to the job for the next year or so.

120hz is nice but as people are saying will be a standard feature soon. Camera is just appalling (regardless of turning HDR/scene optimiser off the image processing is naff) and the battery is hugely disappointing too. Oh, and the finger print scanner is probably worse than the one on the back of the S8.

Progress, sure, but this just isn't good enough to be charging the premium price tag.
 
Soldato
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So now I've noticed if you activate the 3.0 'Hybrid' zoom (which FYI is something like 1.06x optical and then cropped - so not a telephoto lens in the slightest as their BS marketing team claim) the images can be horrendously pixelated. I then played with holding my finger to cover the various lenses on the back and it seems the phone literally randomly skips between using the 'telephoto' lens and the wide angle lens when you have 3.0x hybrid activated. So sometimes you get nice-ish looking images and sometimes pixelated ones.

It's going back.
 
Soldato
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My P30 Pro did the same, image processor decides which lens is best and doesn't always get it right although difference wasn't overly dramatic on that phone. The wide lens crop usually kicked in, in lowish to low light.
 
Caporegime
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So now I've noticed if you activate the 3.0 'Hybrid' zoom (which FYI is something like 1.06x optical and then cropped - so not a telephoto lens in the slightest as their BS marketing team claim) the images can be horrendously pixelated. I then played with holding my finger to cover the various lenses on the back and it seems the phone literally randomly skips between using the 'telephoto' lens and the wide angle lens when you have 3.0x hybrid activated. So sometimes you get nice-ish looking images and sometimes pixelated ones.

It's going back.


I just tested myself and it seems to do it by focus distance, anything closer than 1m or so uses the main camera zoomed in, further away it uses the telephoto camera. Might be something to do with the optics that can't focus so close, but as it's for zooming into things that are far away, it's not a huge problem.

https://youtu.be/Id-20J8Ievc
 
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mrk

mrk

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Telephoto lenses don't have a close focus distance in general unless they are dedicated macro lenses. This all seems fairly normal optical behaviour.
 
Soldato
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Think I just need to accept that mobile phone cameras are never going to be able to compete and just ignore the absolute marketing BS Samsung and Apple come up with every iteration. I honestly thought having come from an S8 this was going to be a reliable side kick for my Fujifilm for important family snaps and memories but I'm disappointed.
 
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Soldato
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Think I just need to accept that mobile phone cameras are never going to be able to compete and just ignore the absolute marketing BS Samsung and Apple come up with every iteration. I honestly thought having come from an S8 this was going to be a reliable side kick for my Fujifilm for important family snaps and memories but I'm disappointed.

Of course a camera that's compromised by its size and shoved into a phone body won't compete with a full sized dedicated model. I think you're going too far with the criticism. A phone camera will make a great sidekick to a full sized camera unless you critically study every little bit of output with a professional eye and complain when it's not the same as a pro camera.

I take lots of photos of my children with my phone and I look at their happy faces rather than the absolute colour accuracy when I'm deciding what photos I like.
 
Soldato
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Of course a camera that's compromised by its size and shoved into a phone body won't compete with a full sized dedicated model. I think you're going too far with the criticism. A phone camera will make a great sidekick to a full sized camera unless you critically study every little bit of output with a professional eye and complain when it's not the same as a pro camera.

I take lots of photos of my children with my phone and I look at their happy faces rather than the absolute colour accuracy when I'm deciding what photos I like.

I am being critical but I just feel a bit lied too (and almost a victim of their marketing) as the camera is barely any improvement over my 2/3 year old S8. It's also frustrating that a lot of the issues are software related and 'optimisation' rather than a fault of the actual hardware itself.
 
I am being critical but I just feel a bit lied too (and almost a victim of their marketing) as the camera is barely any improvement over my 2/3 year old S8.

You must be seeing something I'm not. The non-digital zoom is amazing. The quality is great. Have you had the update?
 
Soldato
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It's also frustrating that a lot of the issues are software related and 'optimisation' rather than a fault of the actual hardware itself.

I had a look back at the photos you posted earlier and I much preferred the middle image that you said was far too over processed. Samsung are known for this and I definitely fall into the camp that prefers punchy over realistic. If you don't like the Samsung way, the iPhone 11 series and Pixel 4 are probably going to give you closer to what you're looking for. The trouble is the iPhone is only 60hz (and expensive), while the Pixel 4 is flawed (but now available at an okay price).
 
Soldato
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I had a look back at the photos you posted earlier and I much preferred the middle image that you said was far too over processed. Samsung are known for this and I definitely fall into the camp that prefers punchy over realistic. If you don't like the Samsung way, the iPhone 11 series and Pixel 4 are probably going to give you closer to what you're looking for. The trouble is the iPhone is only 60hz (and expensive), while the Pixel 4 is flawed (but now available at an okay price).

That's fair enough but why don't they give you the option to disable image processing in settings?

The front facing camera doesn't actually seem to apply much processing or 'face smoothing' yet the rear facing one - as soon as it sees a face - it's game over. That in itself makes no sense to me at all. If you use Pro mode to shoot portraits of people in RAW with the rear facing camera, it actually takes beautiful photos! Yet the in-camera processed JPGs look like a cartoon.

I want to like this phone and I thought perhaps I was being picky and unfair but many of the S20 reviews make the same comment and blurry faces, artefacts, compression and over processing.
 
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Soldato
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The ultra has a completely different sensor.

The issue isn't with the hardware it's with the software and the post-processing of images.

As I've already said if you shoot in Pro mode the RAW files are great to work with - but that's what I want from my Fujifilm not my phone. I want to be able to pass my phone to a random person to get a family snap at the top of Victoria Peak and have faith the camera will capture that memory without murdering the image with processing.

All they would have to do is add a simple option in the settings menu that turns all of this nonsense off. This resonates heavily when Apple/Spotify etc as well as recording studios started murdering the dynamic range on songs so they'd play louder off portable devices, ruining the experience for Hi-Fi owners or anyone who appreciates high fidelity sound.
 
Soldato
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Whilst for the most part I like the extra 'pop' the Samsung adds, I think they could easily add another mode to the camera that did minimal processing. There's enough gimmicky modes in there already, surely 1 more couldn't hurt!
 
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