Samsung's S22 Ultra is more and better

BitDepth#1350

MARK LYNDERSAY

EVERYTHING you might expect from the S22 Ultra, the top-of-the-line smartphone from Samsung, is present. It is sleek and superbly machined. The screen is blade sharp and delivers dead accurate colour.

It's a bit better than its predecessor, the S21 Ultra, and significantly more impressive than the S20 Ultra that came before it.

The camera bump, which Samsung's designers worked hard to present as a design statement on the S21, remains on the S22 Plus and S22, but has almost disappeared on the Ultra model.

Circling each of the five lenses on the back of the phone is a bumper ring that stops the lens from touching a desk or table every time you put the phone down, otherwise the lens system is flush with the body of the Ultra model.

Given the hefty optics that Samsung has been packing into the Ultra series from their introduction, it's a quiet but significant engineering triumph.

The S22 Ultra isn't just an upgrade to the S21 Ultra, it's also taken over the premium slot assigned to the Note series, last updated almost two years ago.

The S21 series introduced support for Samsung's stylus, but the S22 Ultra now ships with its own stylus in a slot on the camera's body, a design feature previously exclusive to the Note.

That's more than adding software support and offering cases with a slot for the stylus. It's a declaration of intent for Note users.

The company's implementation of its camera systems has been irritating (https://bit.ly/3BdW06j) but Samsung has taken steps to remedy those issues with the S22 series.

Samsung has been building sophisticated optics into its smartphones and in its enthusiasm to make the most of computational technology developments has been combining data from multiple lenses to improve their images.

This isn't something that is unique to their designs.

Plenoptic lens designs are used by any device manufacturer who wants to add richer details or portrait mode depth effects to their phones’ effects arsenal.

But in the camera's Pro mode, Samsung continued to use those techniques, making it impossible to capture images using each lens individually.

It's easy to test for it. I use strips of scotch tape to cover the cameras to see which lenses are used at each of the view settings.

In the S20 and S21 Ultra, the ultra-wide lens and normal wide lens are available.

In Pro mode on the S22 series, the camera now captures as expected in manual use, switching between all hardware lens views without falling back on multi-lens data blending.

In consumer Photo mode, the S22 Ultra still blends data from the telephoto (3X) and long telephoto (10X) lens modes when those lens’ focal lengths are selected.

It's a niche concern, because it only affects the capacity of the smartphone to capture a RAW file at each of its lens’ focal lengths, but Samsung considered it important enough to create a new app, Expert RAW, that does this for S22 and S21 phones.

The S21s live transitions were an improvement over the S20s, and its improved again on the S22. Live cuts now include a split-second flare transition as the camera switches between focal lengths.

It isn't a true transitional cut, but it's now possible to do long takes for live streaming, while switching between wide, medium-wide and telephoto using cuts that aren't glaringly abrupt.

If you've been waiting to upgrade from an earlier S series device, the S22 offers a powerful upgrade from the S20 and earlier models, particularly for photographers and videographers.

If you've been waiting for a new Note, well it's here, it just isn't a Note anymore.

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