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The Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra boasts very powerful camera hardware, but it’s not the best camera phone out there. The smartphone is tied with the Huawei Nova 6 5G in second place in DxOMark’s selfie camera ranking. The Huawei P40 Pro tops the chart.
The Galaxy S20 Ultra’s selfie camera scored 104 points for photos and 95 points for videos in the benchmark website’s tests, giving it an overall score of 100 points. The Huawei P40 Pro has an overall score of 103 points for its selfie camera.
Interestingly, the Galaxy S20 Ultra could only manage to pull one point ahead of the Galaxy Note 10+ 5G in DxOMark’s selfie camera tests. This suggests that the former’s software still needs a lot of tuning, as it already packs much-improved hardware.
Samsung has already pushed multiple software updates to the Galaxy S20 Ultra to improve its camera performance. It’s unclear if this review was done pre or post those updates, though.
The Galaxy S20 Ultra’s rear cameras fared worse in DxOMark’s tests a couple of weeks ago. With a score of 122 points, the Samsung flagship only secured seventh place in the benchmark website’s ranking.
Galaxy S20 Ultra DxOMark test
The Galaxy S20 Ultra packs a 40-megapixel selfie camera with an f/2.2 aperture. It is a large 1/2.65-inch Quad Bayer sensor with 2×2 pixel binning, PDAF autofocus (Phase Detection), and auto-HDR processing. There’s no optical image stabilization (OIS).
With 104 points, the smartphone achieved the third-highest Photo Score in the test, behind the two aforementioned Huawei smartphones. Its Video Score of 95 ties with the Huawei P40 Pro at the top of DxOMark’s selfie video rankings.
The Samsung flagship received much praise from the benchmark website for consistently delivering good performance across photos and videos.
It has no significant flaws and generally offers “good exposure, wide dynamic range, pleasant bokeh shots, low noise, reliable autofocus,” and high levels of detail in photos.
However, the handset still leaves something to be desired as it suffers from white balance casts in all lighting conditions, slightly inaccurate color and skin tone rendering, and visible distortion in group pictures.
DxOMark also praised the Galaxy S20 Ultra for its consistent performance in videography. The device can record 4K videos at 60fps with its selfie camera. Video recordings have accurate exposure, high detail, pleasant colors, and a wide depth of field.
There are some issues with autofocus and white balance, though. Videos also have some visible noise and color quantization. You can read DxOMark’s detailed Galaxy S20 Ultra front camera review along with tons of sample photos and videos here.
