I’ve really just seen that for Ron. First every phone review was about bezels being too large, and now this. And on the opposite end of the spectrum, Jennifer thinks all movies are great, I think I have almost exactly the “opposite taste” in movies compared to her. Easy enough to ignore, and a lot of other articles are great.
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Their space stuff is great (if a bit too lovey-dovey with Musk). As are their science articles.
But for their reviews of products? Wastes of time. If they were on a different site, I wouldn’t care, but they don’t fit in with the other articles they publish.
Anyway, talking about going off-topic…
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And now a fairly positive long-ish term review of the S22 Ultra. He seems to be in the demographic that Samsung actually designed the s22 ultra (and earlier notes ) for.
PS: I’m pretty happy with mine after switching from the Fold 3 due to a great deal I got on the Ultra, being able to pass my Fold 3 to my father in law and most importantly realizing that the pen was the star feature for me, as it was with the Fold 3 and even the Duo before it
PPS: one of our engineers that is also a long term note user and just upgraded himself just told me he got an interesting question from our Samsung rep when they were here last week. The question was if/could the display go even bigger and/or closer to a 3:2 aspect ratio. ???
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Now if they first make their tablets 3:2, I would jump at it.
Wouldn’t mind a shorter phone to fit better in pocket though. But I’m the kind of user who willing to have a bigger top bezel if I get to keep the iris scanner, and the screen gained from it ( with the camera hole) isn’t much of a value for me.
The S22 seems to be getting a lot of bad press related to its gaming performance. The phone has no hardware cooling but relies solely on software throttling? Samsung Galaxy S22 walloped by bad reviews
There was a lot of flack about them throttling from the git-go on thousands of apps except benchmark apps. Geekbench delisted it for benchmark manipulation, which doesn’t happen every day.
https://www.fonearena.com/blog/358005/geekbench-delists-samsung-galaxy-s22-series.html
Kind of ridiculous there is a class action lawsuit already in the works. Maybe @desertlap comment more knowledgeably, but to my understanding:
a) All phone manufacturers use throttling service to manage power/thermals generally, and uncap this for isolated benchmark runs. Yes, in a way it’s ‘cheating’, but it’s also legitimately measuring the burst performance. The way to get around this is do consecutive benchmark runs until you hit thermal steady state, something all reviewers should be aware of.
b) The performance disparity is particularly bad on this generation of phones, because Qualcomm raised the turbo freq/power limits on Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chip. Much like Nvidia, they seemed to have hit performance wall that can only be overcome by a node shrink and architectural overhaul. I’m guessing the Nuvia acquisition represents that hope for Qualcomm.
So in short this is nothing new, just somewhat exacerbated by the current SD8 Gen 1 and possibly fab capacity shortages that kept Qualcomm on 7nm.
Yes all of the more recent Android top end phones throttle under load and for the good reason of preventing thermal damage.
The One Plus 9 did it and the new One Plus 10 does too.
The two issues that make Samsung look bad is one they use an app/service that is selective in doing it and they gave no disclosure as to what apps were and weren’t throttling. Compare that to One Plus while yes they were/are throttling they are doing purely based on load. Whereas Samsung was essentially letting some benchmark apps run full speed regardless. Which dependent on the benchmark could make the Samsung appear faster when in real life the app that the bechmark pulls from would get throttled.
And specifically because of that one developer that discovered this was able to run one benchmark repeatedly and bring the phone to thermal failure aka it bricked it.
TLDR Samsung wasn’t playing by the same rules as the rest of the OEMs IMHO and it’s a bad look on what are otherwise absolutely top notch devices.
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Could you post a link to this? I thought all modern processors have built-in thermal shutdown thresholds (eg. Intel Tjmax) to prevent hardware damage.
@Marty my bad, sorry about that, I should have and meant to put “allegedly”" in front of that, and I saw that some where on XDA I think
That being said, it is on the OEM to implement thermal protection in the device unlike with Intel’s chipsets. Qualcomm offers a "generic " version but it’s apparently both too basic and to conservative for OEMs like Samsung and one Plus
@Marty follow up to our exchange yesterday on the benchmark bricking a phone. First off, I still can’t recall where I saw what I talked about with the benchmark app bricking the phone.
However it did get me wondering if it was even possible with modern Samsung phones, so I reached out to our Samsung technical rep about it. His response was " nope, didn’t happen…"
He did confirm that they are using their own custom software/firmware to manage thermals of the phone and have been since the S7 series phones.
He did say that it might be hypothetically possible if either the person rooted the phone and thereby somehow disabled the firmware based protection or perhaps tried this while the phone was sitting in the windshield of a closed car on a 119 degree Arizona summer day, where it would heat up so rapidly the firmware didn’t have time to engage.
So back on topic, he also said the software update to let the customer actually somewhat control the throttling behavior due to the gamecenter app/service should be available by the end of this month.
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So yesterday was the first time I really put my 22 Ultra camera to use. I should start off by saying that in the end, I got some excellent photos and more occasions where I could leave my Nikon DSLR at home.
But Oy! Getting there was a real battle. 
For good or bad, I get to use a lot of different tech over time. And what hit me hard is that there is virtually NO consistency in how the various “RAW” capture options work on the various phones and in multiple instances, the same name (or a close variant) of a feature meant three completely different things on the respective devices (Samsung s22 Ultra, iPhone 13 Pro, Google Pixel 6 pro). And they have very little in common with the at least semi-standard options on the major digital cameras (Sony, Canon, Nikon)
So I am starting from a base of experience with the iPhone, but just trying to get a shot with the most dynamic range possible took me almost a dozen tries on the s22Ultra including turning off what seemed to be the obvious thing I would want on which was HDR 
And don’t even get me started on macro shots…
I’m not sure if this is deliberate as some sort of lock in, or just lack of standards or just not giving a R@@ @$$ what everyone else is doing.
Not to mention that even a basic concept like focal length in conventional photography seems to be utterly meaningless with these smart phones. Samsung for one can’t even seem to be consistent across generations of phones (S21-S22)
Ok, end of rant, like I said after significant effort I did ultimately get some outstanding photos, but it was an effort to get there.
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As I mentioned in the previous forum, my problem with the S21 Ultra cameras was consistency. Sometimes I’d get wonderful shots but most of the time I was scratching my head wondering why the shot looked like cr*p. Macros were especially hit-or-miss.
I regret the loss of the 10x optical telephoto lens but at least my iPhone 13 Pro’s photography is consistent.
Well fortunately I’m seeing consistent results now that I’ve learned the ins and outs of the specific way Samsung camera systems work. What was driving me bonkers was that pretty much 2/3rds of what I knew about advanced photography on my iPhone either didn’t apply or meant very different things on the s22 Ultra.
And specifically having the optical zoom in the Ultra made the difference over my iPhone for a large chunk of what I was doing.
What’s even more interesting, is that even more so, than with say Nikon or Canon, each of the three phones has a very distinct “ethos” for lack of a better term for the final photo output.
eg. Samsung’s photo’s were the most colorful, the iPhone was in the middle and the Pixel’s shot seemed the most muted. OTOH at least with the majority of shots, the Pixels were the most “accurate”
But night type shots looked by far the best on the iPhone, but macro shots looked best on the Samsung, once I figured out how to use it properly.
All this is I think why each reviewer may ding or praise a particular phones photos; it’s far more based on what they’ve become accustomed to seeing than what is technically “accurate/correct”
TLDR: they REALLY need to have some type of standards for functionality and naming of mode etc. like those that exist in the conventional camera world.
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Glad to hear you got it sorted. My common issue with 10x was what looked like oversharpening. The textures would look like I did some kind of extreme smoothing in an editor, too. This was in good daylight. It wasn’t like that when I bought it but I couldn’t get it to stop doing it most of the time during the last 4 months before I dumped it. 
Edit: maybe it was incorrectly using the main lens and doing digital zoom instead of using the 10x lens.
@Dellaster I’ve seen a bit of that especially when I don’t take any manual control of the image. I’ve also seen way too much of the opposite when people are in the frame or using portrait mode. It’s so obvious and fake looking I’ve taken to calling it “Kardashian Mode”.
My biggest complaint is that (and it applies to all three Phones I mentioned) there is no true RAW mode like with a DLSR where the RGB and luminosity values are just written to disk.
And in the case of the S22 Ultra, even if you are shooting in “RAW” it does things like take 5 frames at different exposure levels and then average them together if you don’t explicitly disable HDR.
Ah the joys of computational photography …
Even Apple which general consensus says produces the best night shots; I’d agree they are often the most visually pleasing, but they are extremely inaccurate from a true luminance values standpoint.
Or the Pixel Pros macro shots, where if the AI detects flowers, it jacks up all the color values.
I could go on, but you get the point. But I’d love to see genuine RAW capture on any smartphone so I could take the files and manipulate them (or not) the way I choose.
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We need Nokia back. They actually cared about proper photography. But sadly their people have dispersed to the four winds, several no longer even in the industry.
There’s Sony, but they are still recovering from their utter mess that was their camera software. As that was a standoff between two divisions, that’s going to take some time to heal.
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Have you tried Adobe Lightroom? I’m sure you know it has a camera function that does offer dng raw(& the meh hdr raw), which has been pretty good in my experience vs gcam & OnePlus’ raw files.
From the comparisons I have seen between the current gen night modes I feel like it’s toe to toe between Apple & Google depending on the situation & lens. I know with Gcam you can use night more with all lenses, not sure if iPhone can now do that as in the past it wasn’t able to on the zoom(?). OnePlus is the same as Apple night mode on only the main & UW & not zoom(which theirs is really 2.3x zoom cropped to 3x for some odd reason). It’s a decent night mode, but not up to snuff to gcam in my experience with the OP 8 Pro.
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@Bloodycape I’ve used it but it’s been awhile, and even then never with Smartphone photos.If it can do a better job of extracting accurate photo data, I’d be happy to pony up for a copy.
Thanks!
Lightroom camera is a free feature & so is editing it’s dng file on lightroom mobile app. It’s other mfg raw files you need a sub to adobe to be able to edit it. I like using that camera app for sunsets & other tricky lighting situations I don’t have my Fuji with me & I know the gcam & stock OnePlus camera app won’t be up to snuff. My phone has a similar sensor size to the S21 regular, which is slowly become the standard sensor size on mobile.
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