One area where just about all smartphones could use improvement is with Night Mode, and Samsung says it has done just that with the Galaxy S21 Ultra.
To improve the Night Mode on the Galaxy S21 Ultra, Samsung is using a brighter sensor within the camera system. Which results in clear photos when taken with this mode active.
If you’ve never used the Night Mode on your smartphone, you might not be able to tell the difference in the changes from this year to last year. But it’s definitely a mode worth checking out. Because it can drastically improve the clarity of photos in darker lit areas. Whether inside or outside.
Galaxy S21 Ultra Night Mode uses a brighter sensor to improve image quality
By adding a brighter sensor, you might think that this makes Night Mode photos on the Galaxy S21 Ultra look brighter. But according to Samsung that isn’t really the case.
What the brighter sensor really does here is remove some of the noise that appears in photos taken in this mode. Something which a lot of smartphones tend to struggle with at least a little bit. The phone also utilizes the nona-binning technology that Samsung introduced last year with the Galaxy S20 series phones.
It’s not really possible to tell how well this all works without seeing it first-hand. But if the photos do indeed come out with less noise, photos should look better in low-light situations overall.
If you don’t use the smartphone camera much in low-light, this might not be a big deal to you. But if you use the phone a lot at night, this will be an improvement worthy of the phone upgrade.
This is only available on the Ultra model
As with the 100x Space Zoom and the two telephoto lenses, the improvements to Night Mode are only available on the Ultra variant of Samsung’s latest phones.
Meaning this is the phone model you may want to pick if you’re considering upgrading to a Galaxy S21. That being said, the Galaxy S21 Ultra starts at $1,299. Which is no small amount. So you should ask yourself how much you really want improved Night Mode images.
Especially when you could pick up the Google Pixel 5 for much less money. The recent phones in the Pixel line are also well-known for producing some really good low-light photos. So the Galaxy S21 Ultra is not your only option for a smartphone that takes good Night Mode shots.