Galaxy S21 – inching towards excellence

BitDepth#1293

THE GALAXY S21 series of smartphones represents an incremental improvement over the S20 series released – in a stroke of truly monumental ill-fortune – just as the covid19 pandemic swept the world, shutting down transport systems, storefronts and supply chains (http://ow.ly/3L3c50E0fiQ). By the time I got one of the devices to test, almost six months had passed since its release, making any review more of a history lesson than buyer's guidance (Note20 review here:http://ow.ly/QlYb50E0ko5).

This time around, my test window happened early, as did the launch of the device.

The new features in the S21 line-up are a mix of tidied features, new tools suggested by pandemic-era use of smartphones and a general second pass at making the S series the go-to device for Android smartphone users.

In Pro mode, the video screen is well populated with indicators, including a VU meter with live indicators for audio levels.

Director View is a covid19-inspired effort at turning a smartphone into a videoblogging tool. It's a well-considered move, allowing a user to put a tiny picture-in-picture view of the user captured from the selfie camera into the main video frame, picture-in-picture mode. It's easy to move the postage-stamp-size image around within the frame.

With a tap of a button, it's possible to switch the cameras around or choose split screen, which is, in terms of video switching, an absolutely boss feature to have front and centre on a live stream, though lining up subject matter and presenter views can be challenging.

Director View also replaces the tiny leaf (flame? fir tree?) icons that Samsung uses as indicators of the lens in use with big buttons that preview the angle of view if you switch between the available rear cameras. While the layout is improved significantly and is more usable, the way this switching works in practice is still somewhat glitchy.

One big improvement for still photographers using Pro mode to access the camera's RAW files is the addition of RAW capture for the wide-angle lens. The longer lenses don't get any RAW love this time around and the results, in terms of image quality, are mixed at best.

The quality of images captured with the 108 megapixel capture option in regular Photo mode aren't stellar either. Packing that much capture into the phone's tiny image sensor results in unsightly artefacts, particularly at higher ISOs.

Using the zoom function gives variable results in Telephoto mode, because the device uses software interpolation between the two lenses to work out intermediate focal lengths.

Image quality is best at 3x and 10x but not great, because of aggressive post-processing, and since there is, for instance, no 100mm lens, the phone interpolates, or guesses, based on information gathered from the lenses it does have. Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn't.

There are some measured improvements to overall smartphone features. The chipset has been improved, and the attractive moving lockscreens and main screens are a wholly gratuitous demonstration of the horsepower available on the device.

There's also no charger in the box or slot for a MicroSD card, so buy the model with the capacity you need and fish out a charger from storage.

If you have a Samsung Note 10 or earlier or an S10, there's enough new in the S21 series to encourage a serious look. The Ultra model makes a bold bid to be king of the hill of the entire Samsung line-up, so it's going to be interesting to see what the next Note will bring.

Mark Lyndersay is the editor of technewstt.com. An expanded version of this column can be found there