Juha Saarinen: Is the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra worth its price tag?

The Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra phone. Photo / Getty Images

OPINION:

The Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra phone is heading back to Big S this week, and it’s a great device that I’ll miss, having used it for a month and a half. It’s a big, capable and of course, expensive super premium smartphone that should last users for quite a few years.

It’s fast too, with a customised Qualcomm Snapdragon chipset made with superfine 4 nanometre tech. Following the past pattern of Qualcomm chips, the S23 Ultra can’t touch Apple in the performance stakes despite having two more processor cores and more memory.

Then there’s the S Pen, that stubby little stylus which lets you write and draw on the screen, easily snip areas for screenshots, control the device with gestures and much more. And, you can therapeutically clickity-click the S Pen as you stare into the abyss of video calls.

Not so great for right-handers is Samsung putting the S Pen holder on the left-hand side of the S23 Ultra.

Technically, the holy-moly stuff built into the S23 Ultra is the 200-megapixel sensor in the main camera. Yes, you read that right. That’s up from 108 Mpixel before, and on a relatively small Samsung-made 1.1.3-inch sensor.

Lots of pixels sound impressive, but when that tech arrived on big digital changeable-lens cameras, it was hard to take pictures without a tripod. The pixel-dense sensors would record even the smallest vibrations, making images blurry.

If you’ve been geeking out with digital photography, you’ll know that bazillions of pixels on a small sensor also result in very small photodiodes, which capture the light. On the S23 Ultra sensor, they are a mere 0.6 micrometres in size.

Heaps of small photodiodes bring high resolution but increased image noise in low light, and it’s all unavoidable laws of physics.

Samsung works around that by taking 16 l’il pixels and combining them into a super-pixel, with the image capture being handled by fast, special-purpose processors. This is a bit simplified, but the result is 12 Mpixel images and 4K video, and even 8K movies at 30 frames per second, all of which look really good.

Yes, you can take big 10.5-11 Mbyte pics in 200 Mpixel resolution, but the ones I’ve got weren’t as sharp and detailed as the “pixel binned” ones. There’s a 50 Mpixel resolution mode, too, that’s better than the 200 Mpixel one but for day-to-day shots, sticking to the default camera settings with HEIC and HEIV files works great.

If you’re really pro about smartphone photography, a separate Expert RAW photo app lets you adjust shooting parameters to the nth degree and provides output that can be post-produced to your liking.

The DXOmark camera crazies who really look into the tiniest detail didn’t give the S23 Ultra the top score, but faulting the image and video quality from the Sammy compared to other smartphones is hair-splitting really.

Oddly enough, some of the testing software I used suggested the screen on the S23 Ultra being only 8-bit (16.7 million colours) instead of the expected 10-bit (over a billion colours) as you’d expect on high-end phones. Samsung’s been contacted to verify if that’s the case, and it would be a miss if it was on a photography-oriented smartphone.

One feature that makes a big difference is the 10 times optical zoom on the S23 Ultra.

True, image quality isn’t amazing after dark but it’s very usable in good light. The 30 times hybrid zoom is okay too - at 100 times zoom, image quality is pretty terrible, however. Getting close from a distance (so to speak) with a smartphone camera is quite the technical challenge that Samsung mastered very well on the S23 Ultra.

All the photography and videography is computer-assisted with a touch of artificial intelligence. Samsung’s Scene Optimiser accurately guesses what you’re pointing the camera system at, and adjusts settings accordingly for best results.

This is clever and complex stuff, but it can be a bit heavy-handed, as some users taking pictures of the moon discovered.

Scene Optimiser appears to have gone into an enhancement frenzy and added details to some users’ moon shots that weren’t there originally.

It’s a storm in a teacup in many ways, because without computational photography aids like Scene Optimiser, smartphone images would often be hit-and-miss. If the notion of “making it better” feels wrong, turn off Scene Optimiser in the phone settings.

Price-wise, the S23 Ultra starts at $2299 for 256 gigabytes of storage and 8GB of RAM, going to $3099 for the top 1TB/12GB model. This compares to $2399 for the Apple iPhone 14 Pro Max with the same storage and 6GB memory, and $3199 for the 1TB model.

A little cheaper then, and the S23 Ultra does provide features the iPhone 14 Pro Max doesn’t have, like the longer zoom and the S-Pen. Actually, neither phone is cheap in any sense of the word, but that’s what it costs if you must have this year’s Android or iOS range-topper.

It’s at the top-of-the-range end that Samsung and Apple take a different approach, incidentally. You can save $200 by buying the smaller 6.1-inch iPhone 14 Pro. This means sacrificing battery life by up to a quarter compared to the iPhone 14 Pro Max and screen size of course, but you get all the features of the bigger phone otherwise.

Stepping down to the S23+ from the Ultra means a slightly smaller screen, 6.6 inches versus 6.8 inches, but you lose the great camera system, the S-Pen and the larger cousin’s chunky battery.

An S23+ means saving $350, which is not to be spat at. If you’re going to drop a couple of thousand on a smartphone, though, the Ultra is worth the extra money for the features it brings.

Not that I would ever give Adrian Orr a nosebleed and suggest you spend that kind of money on a smartphone while we try to take the inflationary economy out the back, but there you have it.

Premium smartphones nowadays go from amazingly good to even better but to be honest, the improvements are incremental. The improvements are nice to have for sure, but unless you have very specific needs as a user that older devices can’t fulfil, the case for upgrading from, say, a two- to three-year-old device is pretty weak.

Are we at the zenith of innovation for smartphones? Maybe, maybe not, but it does feel like something new is needed beyond foldable screens.

No, not neural implants with 5G please, but a better-to-hold form factor than the “chocolate bar” one, and week-long battery life to start with. Surely that’s where we should be in 2023?