Picture quality...is this normal? Are there settings for this?

[MoreDef]

Okay, so this may be entirely a personal preference thing, but I really don't like how this camera represents people, more specifically how it represents skin. Here are some examples. The first 3 are with the Ultra, and upon zooming in, it turns into an oil painting, or basically what any picture looks like when using 100x zoom. The last 2 are what it looks like when I zoom into the same scene, but taken with the Pixel 3XL. The Pixel keeps the borders without making it look over sharpened. Do all Ultra pictures of people look like mine when zoomed in? Is it normal, and the only thing wrong is my personal preference? If not, what settings should I be changing to make skin and people look less oil-painty? As it stands, I've turned off scene optimizer. Is there anything else I can do? Or is that the just how Ultra pictures of people come out?

 

[neil74]

It is a Samsung thing, not unique to the Ultra I'm afraid.

 

[SpookDroid]

This has been discussed and reviewed ad nauseam; as mentioned above, this is Samsung's approach to overprocessing skin and faces. You can minimize the effect if you turn off any Beauty Mode filter strengths and use abundant lighting on the subject, but unfortunately there is no way to 'turn off' that overprocessing. You might get better results with a 3rd party camera that doesn't process images as much or maybe try RAW images (although I'm not sure if these are written after or before processing on the Samsung camera app).