Exynos camera is an absolute joke!😡😡😡

[AliIbrahim]

Check this out...

https://youtu.be/31Ez2ZhP4BI

[K Dimov]

See this bulls**t with the 10x zoom and that's on the latest AUB9 update. They fixed my *****!!!

 

 

[AliIbrahim]

it's lowlight this camera is now awful at. UHD 60fps the video is awful if it's not 100% well lighten also photos too

[Mar57643]

Hi K Dimov

I'm not sure if this is a camera change in the firmware as i've only recently got my phone. What I can say is this is Samsungs' "focus enhancer" mode kicking in by default. I've been playing around with the software quite considerably and what it's doing is deciding not enough light is reaching the sensor to get a sharp photo on the 10x telephoto lens, so it drops back to the 3x lens to get a better f-stop and a faster shutter speed.....What you end up with is an upscaled photo! In almost ALL scenarios this is a inferior image compared to a genuine optical shot! This is something you can actually see happening as the lens literally "jumps" from one to another, so you know the "smarts" are making the choice for you. Whether you wanted it or not!

What's most infuriating is its actually a button you can turn off for the wide angle to macro "smart" as it appears as a yellow button that you can disable. Sadly this doesn't carry to the tele lenses and it will insist on dropping to the 3x from the 10x if it feels the shot is in jeopardy! Uggh.

One thing I have found is you can sometimes get around this by using night mode, this buys a little extra time before the jump, as you get an expanded ISO range. But it will still annoyingly make the jump, often when you least expect it! 

One extra thing to note, i've noticed the camera doing this even is some very brightly lit scenes outdoors, this seems to happen when i'm choosing a subject much closer to the lens than say a distance shot and for some bizarre reason it still jumps down to the 3x zoom even though there's more than enough light! I'm flippin outside FGS! Again night mode saves the day, and in this case it never jumps back down to the 3x.

I hope this helps.

Martin

[Mar57643]

Being an engineer myself this is something I really care about. The differences between the Exynos and Snapdragon is pretty unforgiveable and since the mistakes made in the S20 (premium) series I think it's time end-users need to vote with their feet and put forward a class action to finally put a stop to this kind of behaviour. Is it really all that different to the deception perpetrated by Volkswagen? Samsung have not been honest about the differences and this should be reflected in what we pay for the devices across the world.

[Mar57643]

I also have an S20 FE 5G which impressed me so much I decided to try out the Exynos S21 Ultra after reading mistakes made in the previous generation had been ironed out. I have to say that apart from the obvious hardware improvements i.e. the 10x zoom and dual pixel/laser autofocus across all lenses, the S20 FE 5G feels snappier due to its Snapdragon CPU even though it's an older generation and for the price, it's still feels like a better choice. For now I will be sticking with the ultra and see if Samsung can improve things further in software. My suspicion is they've pretty much done all they can as the processing pipelines are still too far apart. Samsung i'm sure are fully aware of this, but choose to market the S21 series as the "same phone" across the world.

[Mar57643]

There is a sense of irony in this sorry story, in that Samsung was effectively "forced" by the American government to use Snapdragon. They felt Samsung was competitively damaging Qualcomm's ability to successfully market their processors in this space hence why they are used exclusively in US handsets. It's a major kick in the teeth for Samsungs profits, but also terribly embarrassing when the "competing processor" absolutely trounces anything Samsung themselves can produce, despite their best efforts to date. So the Americans are on a win win here while everyone else pays the price for an obviously inferior product!

[AliIbrahim]

if I didn't dislike other phone manufacturers I would say don't buy Samsumg and make then learn but I'm not a fan of other phones unfortunately

[Mar57643]

Hi K Dimov

I moved my attention in the late afternoon to indoor photography and by this time daylight is at a premium in early spring here in the UK (no cloud). I was curious what the software would do and i'm really shocked with what was coming out of the camera.

At first I focused on some cactus on our windowsill which was offering the best light for the time of day. If I put the phone in photo mode and worked my way through the lenses, it would either drop down a lens 10x to 3x with the same terrible results as my outdoor shots or it would  pick a crop from the  vast 1x 108MP sensor.  I thought this would give (when compared to the other lenses at least) the better picture, and yes sure it was better than a scaled up 3x shot, but sadly still not as good as the actual optical tele lenses even though ambient light was starting to fade. With a lot of faffing about I could get the tele lenses to fire, which involved selecting the zoom mode and then dragging my finger over the icon to get the variable zoom feature and ensuring 3x or 10x was selected. When I could get them to work, the pictures were the best of the bunch by some margin.

Next test was to move away from the windows and pick some darker areas of the house where light was at a further premium with the camera potentially suffering high noise/high ISO, but not quite night shots. At this point the camera was almost exclusively picking the 1x 108MP sensor and cropping in and again quality was disappointing. To mitigate this as much as possible I chose night mode, it seems that the 3x tele (at least in some scenarios is preferred) along with multiple exposures and produces what is arguably some of the best quality pictures out of the camera. All really sharp with lots of detail, in fact night mode in general does seem to be very good when I compare it to say, my Pixel 4XL shots of the past.

This is camera software that I will have to learn what to do in certain shooting situations to get the very best out of it. The lens/sensor hardware are absolutely incredible in this model, but it's becoming clear that the software is way off matching it in many scenarios.

[K Dimov]

@Mar57643 Hello Martin. Everything points out to bad software maangement/development on Samsung's end. Back when Samsung S came out, I moved to iPhone 4 because the stupid Samsung S did not work flawlessly out of the box. That was not the case with the iPhone. I came back to Android with the Samsung S6, then the Note 8 to see much improvement. However, we all are missing the major point here. Why do we have to try and tinker with the settings, apps, etc. to get the best of what should be a point-and-shoot camera (not pro mode)? It is not reliable at all! And that is SamDUNG (yes, intended) fault. Same story with the battery. Lets disable this, turn off that, limit this ... I am done with their sh*t! A class-action lawsuit indeed should be made so they can suck it up for once and not their customers.