Preliminary S10 Plus Review

[omarshawki]

Thank you ! This works awesome

 

[omarshawki]

Could you please take a photo of a cat or dog in low light? Really interested to see if they've finally sorted the blurring / over smoothing of details that the S9 had due to aggressive noise reduction.

Also interested to see if the "pet mode" makes a difference as "pet" is one of the new scenes recognised by the scene optimiser.

I don't have any pets but here's a photo I took with the phone

 

[nndlb123]

No not really. I said sometimes and it's only sometimes the iPhone has the better colour reproduction. What's better is subjective and also heavily reliant on what the photo is. Sometimes I prefer the punchy colours, sometimes I want the much better detail that the S10 gives over the iPhone.
As I said I don't think there is one camera that's the best in every situation and I don't think there ever will be but the Samsung does give consistently better images in all situations.

 

[omarshawki]

Here are some more pics I took. All on automatic since I'm not much of an expert

 

[Itsa_Me_Mario]

Using DXOMark scores is not a reliable way of comparing phone cameras -- particularly if the number of cameras is not the same. DXOMark gives "bonus points" for extra cameras -- this is why the Pixel scores are so low (just the single back camera), despite being widely proclaimed as the best phone camera, and why the phones with three cameras on the back of the phone score higher.

Generally agree. The weird weighted scoring they have now is extremely strange, and since it is not disclosed - the scores are not reproducible. I've attempted to replicate the functions necessary to come up with a score of 114 out of 95, 89, 70, 75, 77, 94, 68 and 54 with the same equation producing 103 out of 92, 84, 98, 71, 64, 73, 89, 47 and 50. Obviously, the weights on some of these scores are higher than 1.0 and/or there is a multiplier of some sort. I'm not entirely convinced that they're not just making it up. Adding in that major features, such as Night Sight, are ignored makes their reliability to real world even more problematic than it used to be.

Edit to add, the closest I've been able to get (and simplest attempt) was to just take the average of the scores x 1.4. That gives me 113.7 which I'd be ok rounding to 114, but 103.9 on the other, which would not be acceptable to round down. It also doesn't make sense to do it that way, because otherwise the straight average score would be totally representative.

 

[Itsa_Me_Mario]

I would suggest you review all those pictures done from GCAM on a S9 or N9 phone and you will say otherwise. They look much better and in much better quality than the Pixel itself. The Pixel camera with one single lens is now way behind the competition. No zoom, no wide view, and so on.

I'm not saying the Pixel is a better camera, I'm saying that gcam alone isn't enough to bring an inferior camera up to speed. The mechanism on why the Pixel is thought to be better by a lot of people is more reliant on a hardware/software compliment, than on just an app.

The Note 9 and the Pixel 3 have very similar scores already, so it's not unexpected that they have similar performance when running the same software. Yet their strengths are still going to remain situational due to the hardware differences.

 

[NIZMOZ44]

I'm not saying the Pixel is a better camera, I'm saying that gcam alone isn't enough to bring an inferior camera up to speed. The mechanism on why the Pixel is thought to be better by a lot of people is more reliant on a hardware/software compliment, than on just an app.

The issue here isn't the camera being inferior. The Pixel camera is inferior. The software itself is what makes that camera so good. When you put GCAM with a great camera like the S10, it does magic.

 

[Itsa_Me_Mario]

The Pixel camera is inferior

This may just be semantics, but from what I can tell, the count of cameras is inferior, not the hardware itself.

The primary shooter on the Pixel is very similar to that used on the S10 - both 12MP, one is 76 degree field of view, the other is 77 degrees, both using dual pixel technology, both using OIS, etc. The advantage of the S10 is thus not the hardware of that lens, but the existence and reliance on the other two lenses which are able to significantly enhance the amount of data collected in each shot, depending on settings.

 

[Lundon44]

Also, for anyone that is a Swiftkey user (like myself) you'll be disappointed to know that the sizing of the virtual keyboards are broken on the highest resolution setting. If I reduce it back down to FHD it's fine again.

A couple of games (Zen Pinballs) are completely unplayable unless I manually switch the games to run in full screen (default is auto). Found that to be a bit odd. Something tells me that some devs will need to update their apps/games asap to optimize properly to the full resolution of the S10's.

 

[JHBThree]

This may just be semantics, but from what I can tell, the count of cameras is inferior, not the hardware itself.

The primary shooter on the Pixel is very similar to that used on the S10 - both 12MP, one is 76 degree field of view, the other is 77 degrees, both using dual pixel technology, both using OIS, etc. The advantage of the S10 is thus not the hardware of that lens, but the existence and reliance on the other two lenses which are able to significantly enhance the amount of data collected in each shot, depending on settings.

The raw hardware by numbers may be similar, but have you ever taken a pic on a Pixel 3 with HDR+ turned off? The quality is pretty darn terrible. Google's software is what makes the Pixel cameras so good. Otherwise they'd be pretty mediocre.

 

[EMGSM]

Honestly if camera is really, really, really important to you. I suggest looking into a pixel 3 or the latest iPhone. The s10 will have a great camera, but probably not top 2 quality. Just my 2 cents.

This is exactly what I'm expecting. Great camera just not Pixel great.

 

[EMGSM]

The issue here isn't the camera being inferior. The Pixel camera is inferior. The software itself is what makes that camera so good. When you put GCAM with a great camera like the S10, it does magic.

Agree 100%! It's not the camera. It's the software. GCAM is a great example.

 

[Itsa_Me_Mario]

The raw hardware by numbers may be similar, but have you ever taken a pic on a Pixel 3 with HDR+ turned off? The quality is pretty darn terrible. Google's software is what makes the Pixel cameras so good. Otherwise they'd be pretty mediocre.

All of the heavy lifting in all cameras on smartphones is done by software. The reason that they are so software heavy is because they lack the hardware to take actual quality shots, no matter how good the hardware is - the space and size limitations alone put a stiff upper limit on the quality that can be attained by just throwing hardware into the mix.

So for example, the S9/S9+ use the Sony IMX345 sensor for the main shooter, while the V40 and Pixel 3 use the Sony IMX363, a newer and better sensor. I haven't been able to find a reliable source to know exactly what is in the S10+. Either way, the raw hardware of the Pixel 3 was better than that in the S9+, yet we're seeing claims of the Pixel 3 hardware being mediocre, as you said, or that half of the Google software (apk only) being used in conjunction with the older sensors is going to be enough to bridge the gap created by the combination of the visual core, newer sensor and all of the applicable software, as the person I responded to said. I'm skeptical.